United States: According to a recent report from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on Sunday, five people who were workers working at an egg farm in Weld County, Colorado, were found to be positive for bird flu.
More about the news
Four of the cases were confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whereas one case’s test is yet to be confirmed.
The cases have come from a significant outbreak of flu, which occurred at a farm, where 1.8 million chickens were found positive for the disease.
The workers were following the orders to cull those infected chickens. After the incident, the governor of Colorado state announced a disaster emergency, as fortune.com reported.
The announcement described it as the first time that a cluster of human infections has come into the picture, with a small farm involved in the US, highlighting the seriousness of the disease.
About the disease – Experts
According to the health officials, the workers’ symptoms appeared to be conjunctivitis (pink eye) and respiration-related issues, although no one was hospitalized.
However, according to the officials, this incident was also seen as a turning point, which the experts had been worrying about for some time.
According to Seema Lakdawala, a microbiologist and immunologist at Emory University who specializes in influenza, “I am extremely concerned that we are on the brink of this being really already in humans—and once it’s in humans, it is going to be a real problem to control,” as fortune.com reported.
“I will tell you that what has been driving me the past few months is trying to prevent H5 from becoming a pandemic…I have never felt that we were as close as we are now,” Lakdawala added.
CDC officials have reported that H5N1 has a “pandemic potential” while adding that they haven’t yet seen genetic changes in the virus that would make human transmission more probable; therefore, experts call the risk to the general public as low.