The USA has recorded the first death of a person infected with bird flu.

The patient was from southwest Louisiana and was hospitalized last month with the first known serious case of bird flu in the country.

On Monday, the Louisiana Department of Health said the person had died of the disease but provided few other details due to privacy concerns.

The patient was over 65 years old and had previous illnesses.

According to a press release, the patient contracted the disease after being exposed to “a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds.” A “large public health investigation” found no additional cases of H5N1 in any person or evidence of human-to-human transmission.

More than 60 people have been infected with bird flu during the current outbreak, mostly through close contact while working with infected dairy cows or poultry.

While these cases mostly resulted in mild illness, other strains of bird flu have proven to be quite deadly to humans in the past. Of the more than 950 cases reported to the World Health Organization, about 50% resulted in death.

“We have more than 20 years of data that shows this is a pretty bad virus,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. “I don’t expect that future infections will all be mild.”

In November, a 13-year-old girl in British Columbia, Canada, was hospitalized with bird flu. How she became infected with the virus is unclear. But her illness was so severe that she required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to stay alive.

This case underscores that it is “very difficult to predict who will become seriously ill after an infection,” Nuzzo said. “We should not discount this recent death in Louisiana because the patient had underlying health conditions.”

Genetic sequencing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that the H5N1 virus responsible for these two serious diseases belongs to the “D1.1” genotype. Although this is a different genetic lineage than the virus that infects dairy cattle, it is still part of the same strain that circulates worldwide in wild birds and dairy herds in the United States – technically known as clade 2.3.4.4b.

The virus appears to have acquired some worrisome mutations over the course of the Louisiana patient’s illness.

The same thing could have happened in Canada. However, in both cases there is no evidence that others were infected.

In a statement about the death in Louisiana, the CDC reiterated that the risk to the general public is still considered low and said there are no “virological changes actively spreading in wild birds, poultry or cows that increase the risk to the.” would increase human health”. “

The outbreak in dairy cattle led to California recently declaring a state of emergency, keeping health officials on tenterhooks because of the increased risk of transmitting the virus to humans.

They advise avoiding contact with wild birds, poultry and rodents and washing your hands after touching feces or objects that may be contaminated with saliva or mucus, such as: B. Bird feeders.

Pets can also become infected with the virus, particularly through consumption of raw meat or milk, which can also harbor high viral loads.

Edited by Jane Greenhalgh