Another Avian Flu (H6N1) Jumps To Humans

It’s becoming obvious to health news followers in the 21st century that avian flu like influenza A (H7N9), discovered in March, only endanger humans if the parent bird disease mutates. This has occurred again in 2013 with the H6N1 strain, the online journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine reported on Thursday.

Sung-Hsi Wei of the School of Medicine at National Yang-Ming University and Centres for Disease Control, Taipei, Taiwan, reported the case with four main colleagues and others. They found lower respiratory tract illness associated with avian H6N1 influenza virus, never previously discovered in people. The patient was a 20-year-old woman from Taiwan who was short of breath and hospitalized in May with a lung infection. After treatment with Tamiflu and antibiotics, she was able to return home.

Experts at the Taiwan Centres for Disease Control used virus isolation and sequencing to identify her infection as H6N1 bird flu, originating in the wild but widely appearing in chickens. The patient had worked in a deli. Although she had no known connection to live birds, investigators noted several people close to her also developed flu-like symptoms but did not test positive for H6N1.

In an accompanying article, “The expanding list of zoonotic influenza viruses,” Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist, applauded the work and offered a rhetorical comment: “The question again is what would it take for these viruses to evolve into a pandemic strain?”
Dr. Koopmans said it was worrying that scientists had no early warning signals that bird flu could be a problem until humans got ill, Maria Cheng reported for AP.

“Scientists often monitor birds to see which viruses are killing them, in an attempt to guess which flu strains might be troublesome for humans—but neither H6N1 nor H7N9 make[s] birds very sick.”