H5N1 bird flu has killed an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia, and twelve more children are suspected of being infected
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The 12 suspected cases are in the same province as an 11-year-old girl who died from the infection on Wednesday, raising fears that the virus is spreading from person to person for the first time in decades.
The Khmer Times, a local newspaper, reported that the suspected patients, four of whom are symptomatic, have all been tested for the virus and are awaiting lab confirmation.
After causing an unprecedented number of cases among the world’s bird population over the past year, several experts in America fear that the close proximity of the cases may be a sign of human transmission.
The virus has only been found in about 870 cases, but nearly half of them resulted in death.
Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a Johns Hopkins immunologist, responded to the suspected outbreak in Cambodia. ‘Key information is whether the 12 infected people got it from a bird source or from human-to-human transmission, which would be very concerning,’ he wrote on Twitter.
Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and the Chief of the COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute, tweeted: ‘Hope this wasn’t human to human, but I’m now worried.’
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H5N1 was first discovered in chickens in Scotland in 1959, and it was discovered again in China and Hong Kong in 1996. It was discovered in humans for the first time in 1997.
