A man aged 41 in China’s eastern region of Jiangsu has been confirmed as the first human case of infection with an rare strain of bird flu known as H10N3, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said on Tuesday.
A wide range of strains of bird influenza are available in China and some irregularly contaminate individuals, normally those working with poultry.
There is no indication that H10N3 can spread easily in people.
The man, an resident of the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalized on April 18 and diagnosed with H10N3 on May 28, the health commission said. It didn’t give details of how the man was infected.
He is currently stable and ready to be released. Examinations of his close contacts tracked down no different cases, the NHC said. No different instances of human infection with H10N3 have been reported for universally, it added.
H10N3 is low pathogenic, which implies it causes moderately less extreme infection in poultry and is probably not going to cause a huge scale outbreak, the NHC added.
The strain is “not a very common virus,” said Filip Claes, local research facility organizer of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Emergency Center for Transboundary Animal Diseases at the local office for Asia and the Pacific.
Just around 160 isolates of the virus were reported for in the 40 years to 2018, generally in wild birds or waterfowl in Asia and some limited parts of North America, and none had been detected in chickens up until this point, he added.
Dissecting the genetic data of the infection will be important to decide if it looks like more older viruses or if it is a novel mix of different viruses, Claes said.
There have been no critical quantities of human infections with bird influenza since the H7N9 strain killed around 300 individuals during 2016-2017.
