Between 2013 and 2017, bird flu infected more than 1,500 people in China
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, BEIJING — A man in China contracted bird flu the first type of H10N3 in humans. This was reported directly by the Chinese government, Tuesday (1/6).
China’s National Health Commission, said the 41-year-old man was hospitalized on April 28. “This infection is unintentional cross-species transmission,” the National Health Commission said Washington Post.
The commission confirmed no human cases of H10N3 were reported elsewhere. The news comes amid increasing public awareness of the threat of disease that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic that claimed many lives around the world.
But unlike the coronavirus, there is a global influenza surveillance system that keeps an eye on human cases of bird flu, since a strain of the disease called H5N1 emerged in the late 1990s in Hong Kong’s bustling live poultry market.
Between 2013 and 2017, another bird flu named H7N9 infected more than 1,500 people in China through close contact with infected chickens.
Given this history, the authorities are not surprised to see cases of various types of bird flu in humans and they are closely monitoring any signs of human-to-human spread.
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