Two more people in mainland China have tested positive for H5N6 bird flu, raising the number of cases reported this month to eight, officials said. The recent spike in human cases has led to calls for increased surveillance.
Hong Kong’s Ministry of Health said in a statement that it was notified of two additional cases in humans in Sichuan and Zhejiang provinces. Both cases occurred earlier this month but were not immediately announced by local officials.
The first case, a 68-year-old man from Langzhong in Sichuan province, fell ill on January 3 and was taken to a local hospital the following day, where he remains in critical condition. There is no word on how he might have been infected.
The second case, a 55-year-old woman from Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, fell ill on January 6 after being exposed to slaughtered poultry. He was admitted to a county hospital on January 9 and remains in critical condition.
Only 67 people have been infected with H5N6 bird flu since the first confirmed case in 2014, but more than half of these were reported over the past 6 months. Eight cases, including two deaths, have been reported so far this year.
Click here for a list of all human cases to date.
H5N6 bird flu is known to cause severe illness in humans of all ages and has killed nearly half of those infected, according to the WHO. No cases of human-to-human transmission have been confirmed but a woman who tested positive last year has denied coming into contact with live birds.
“The increasing trend of avian influenza virus infections in humans has become an important public health problem that cannot be ignored,” the researchers said in a study published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control in September. The study highlights several mutations in two recent cases of H5N6 avian influenza.
Thijs Kuiken, professor of comparative pathology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, expressed concern about the rising number of cases. “It could be that this variant is a bit more infectious (to humans) … or maybe there’s more of this virus in poultry at the moment and that’s why more people are infected,” Kuiken told Reuters in October.
Earlier that month, a WHO spokesman said the risk of human-to-human transmission remained low because H5N6 had not yet acquired the capability for sustained human-to-human transmission. However, the spokesman added that increased surveillance was “very much needed” to better understand the increasing number of human cases.
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