Dr. Lucci blamed himself for not thinking to test the boy the day before when treating him for the flu might have saved his life.
But her warning and the emergency action that followed demonstrated the strength of Cambodia’s disease tracking system and its importance to global biosurveillance systems.
This is the result of many years of international and regional investment, training and public education. How frontline work in low-income countries is impacting the global system for detecting zoonotic diseases (pathogens that can be transmitted between animals and humans, as COVID-19 has been). It shows how important it is. The goal is to identify and contain those diseases and buy time to manufacture enough vaccines and drugs to treat them, or embark on a frantic mission to develop something new. .
growing threat
H5N1 is one of many viruses that cause influenza in birds. It first appeared in Hong Kong in 1996 and has since evolved to cause outbreaks in wild and captive birds, sometimes jumping onto humans.
In 2020, a particularly deadly new infectious disease spread along migration routes to parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe caught the attention of scientists.
By 2022, the virus has reached the Americas, killing wild and domestic animals, including livestock and marine mammals.
So when two cases of H5N1 infection were reported in Cambodia in February 2023, scientists were alarmed. Could this be a new version of the virus that has returned to Asia and killed people? The country hasn’t had such a human infection in nearly a decade, but scientists have been discovering that the virus has been present in birds for much of that time.
Genetic analysis has shown that the virus infecting Cambodians is not from the Americas, but is a well-known subtype, which is reassuring. Still, Cambodia has reported 11 cases of bird flu over the past year, including five deaths, more than any other country in the world.
Global concerns about the H5N1 virus have increased in recent weeks after the virus was detected in goats and dairy cows in the United States and later sickened in a Texas farm worker.
As viruses move between species, scientists are concerned that they could evolve and spread more easily from birds to mammals, as well as from humans to humans.
