The bird flu virus has undergone dangerous mutations

The first serious human case of bird flu in the United States is a carrier of a virus that has mutated inside its body to adapt to the human respiratory tract, US health authorities announced Thursday.

The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that an elderly patient was hospitalized in Louisiana in “critical condition” after being infected with the H5N1 virus, reports AFP.

A first serious case of bird flu in the US, in a man hospitalized in Louisiana. 61 cases of bird flu in humans registered since April, CDC announces. Thus, a small part of the virus found in the patient’s throat had genetic changes that could lead to “a stronger binding of the virus” to certain “cell receptors in the human upper respiratory tract”.

These changes were “probably generated during virus replication in the patient,” the CDC said, adding that no transmission of this mutated virus has been identified. These changes were not observed in contaminated birds, including those with which the patient may have come into contact in a poultry farm.

Medical experts are doing extensive research

Experts contacted by AFP said it was too early to determine whether these changes could allow the virus to spread more easily or cause more serious cases in humans.

The mutation in question is “a necessary step for a virus to become more contagious,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told AFP. “But I would emphasize that it is not the only one” needed, she added. Angela Rasmussen says the mutation could allow the virus to enter cells more easily, but further tests on animals would need to be carried out to confirm this.

The risks of genetic modifications

Genetic changes have already been observed in the past in patients infected with bird flu who became seriously ill, but this did not lead to an increase in the transmissibility of the virus to humans.

Thijs Kuiken, from the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, believes these changes could lead to less serious infections, with the virus becoming “more susceptible” to “infecting the upper respiratory tract”, causing a runny nose or sore throat , than to affect the lower respiratory tract, leading to pneumonia. Therefore, these observations do not mean that we are approaching a “pandemic”, insisted Angela Rasmussen.

In addition to this patient in Louisiana, 65 mild cases of the disease have been detected in humans in the United States since the beginning of the year, but others may not have been detected, according to the source cited by News.ro.

Avian influenza A (H5N1) first appeared in 1996, but since 2020 the number of outbreaks in birds has exploded and an increasing number of mammal species have been affected.