Recent cases of bird flu discovered in two Cambodian villagers, one of them fatal, show no signs of person-to-person transmission, health officials in the Southeast Asian nation say, allaying fears of a public health crisis.
An 11-year-old Cambodian girl from a village in the southeastern province of Prey Veng died on February 22 at a hospital in the capital, Phnom Penh, shortly after tests confirmed she had type A H5N1 bird flu. Her father tested positive for the virus the day after her death, but showed no strong symptoms and was released Tuesday from a Prey Veng hospital where she had been isolated, the Health Ministry said. He was sent home after three negative tests.
The two were the only villagers among more than two dozen tested to have the virus, the ministry said in a statement.
Bird flu, also known as avian influenza, is usually transmitted between poultry, but can sometimes be transmitted from birds to humans. The recent detection of infections in a variety of mammals has raised concerns among experts that the virus could evolve to spread more easily between people and potentially trigger a pandemic. The Health Ministry said an investigation determined that both the father and daughter «had been infected by poultry in their village, and there is no indication or evidence that there was an infection from father to daughter.»
Experts from the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as their Cambodian counterparts, concluded that they were infected directly from birds, he told The Associated Press. Ly Sovann, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health.
In an interview published Tuesday on the website of the scientific journal Nature, a Cambodian virologist said the girl who died had been infected with a different strain of bird flu virus than the one that has been spreading around the world. during the past year and that one half between wild and domestic birds.
Erik Karlsson, of the Cambodian Pasteur Institute in Phnom Penh, was part of the team that analyzed the girl’s virus sample, and was quoted as saying it belongs to a group of viruses that have been found in chickens and ducks in the region for at less than a decade. He was the first person in Cambodia since 2014 to be detected with H5N1.
He said it was unclear why the girl would have contracted the virus after so long with no cases, but suggested it could be related to «many global changes in farming practices due to the COVID-19 pandemic that could have created the conditions for an overflow”.
“We know that, in Cambodia, the pandemic increased the amount of backyard poultry farming. Many people, for example tour guides, were unable to work and had to supplement their income and sources of food for their families,” he said. “Around the world, people continue to struggle, leading to changes in farming practices that can increase the risk of contagion. And changes in people’s health, for example malnutrition or being overweight, can make people more susceptible to becoming infected.»