The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg has confirmed that the infection in a teenager in Canada is a different strain of bird flu than is currently found in dairy cattle, however, it was indeed caused by the H5N1 virus. The British Columbia teen has been hospitalized and is said to be in critical condition.
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Genetic sequencing has shown that the infection in Canada is of a genotype that has been found in wild birds, not the version that has been circulating in dairy cattle in the United States.
The H5N1 virus has evolved into a variety of strains over the nearly 30 years that it has circulated globally. The version that is spreading in cows is known as a 2.3.4.4b virus, of a genotype called D3.13. There have been about 46 human cases confirmed in the U.S. this year, all involving very mild illness, according to a report by STAT News.
The virus strain that infected the Canadian teenager was a 2.3.4.4b virus of the D1.1 genotype. This version of the virus, which is spread by wild birds, has caused poultry outbreaks in a variety of places, including recently in Washington state.
British Columbia currently has 26 H5N1 outbreaks in poultry operations. A good number of those have occurred in the Fraser Valley in the southwestern part of the province. The infected teenager lives in that part of the province.
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Historically, H5N1 has been associated with severe illness. Of the roughly 950 human cases recorded to date, just under half have died.
Health officials in British Columbia have been unable so far to determine how the teenager contracted bird flu. He or she is too ill to answer questions, but information provided by family members suggests there was no exposure to infected poultry, Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer, said. The teenager did have contact with a number of pets — cats, dogs, and reptiles — both at home and the homes of friends. But none of those animals tested positive for the virus. –STAT News
Allison McGeer, an infectious diseases consultant at Toronto’s Sinai Health, and a professor at the University of Toronto, says that this could be a “one-off” event. “You would think that if this was the beginning of something that we would have seen other cases by now,” McGeer said. “Every day that we don’t hear anything from B.C. is a good day.”
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