New virus: China reports world’s first human case of H10N3 avian influenza

BEIJING.- One 41 year old male from Jiangsu, a province east of China, has been confirmed as the first human case in the world infected with the H10N3 strain of avian influenza, According to information from the National Health Commission of China (NHC).

The health authority noted that this resident of Zhenjiang City He was hospitalized on April 28, with a fever and other symptoms, and was diagnosed with the H10N3 bird flu virus a month later on May 28. However, in the NHC they did not give details of how he got infected.

As long as it is stable and ready to be unloaded of the hospital, no other case was found during the medical observation of your loved ones.

“The risk of large-scale spread is extremely low”, mentioned by the Chinese health authority, which evaluated the H10N3 with unlikely to cause death or serious illness.

This strain “is not a very common virus”, according to what he said Reuters Filip Claes, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). He added that from 1940s to 2018, said pathogen has only been isolated 160 times, mostly in wild and aquatic birds, in Asia and parts of North America. In addition, he pointed out that it had not been detected in chickens.

Claes pointed out that the genetic information analysis H10N3 to see if it looks like older viruses, or if it is a “new mix” of different viruses.

Different strains of avian flu are present in China and some infect people sporadically, usually those who work with poultry. However, there have not been a significant number of human infections with avian influenza since epidemic, in 2016 and 2017, of H7N9. According to the FAO, This variant has spread to 1,668 people and has caused 616 deaths since 2013.

Alarms are now hanging over China, as the Covid-19 was first detected in a food and animal market in Wuhan, in the center of the country at the end of 2019, and since then it has killed more than 3.5 million people worldwide. It is even being investigated whether its spread was actually caused by a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Reuters and AFP agencies

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