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The death of an eleven-year-old boy highlights a new risk for the world’s second most populous nation struggling with the coronavirus pandemic.
India is investigating its first documented human death from bird flu after an 11-year-old boy died from the disease earlier this month, the health ministry said.
The boy was admitted to India’s First Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi on July 2. He died Tuesday of multiple organ failure, a government statement said on Wednesday.
Health workers treating the patient and the boy’s family have been kept in isolation and authorities have started contact tracing, the statement said.
In Haryana, the boy’s home state in northern India, the Livestock Department found no suspected cases of bird flu but stepped up surveillance, he said.
Genome sequencing and virus isolation are underway and an epidemiological investigation has been launched, the health ministry said.
The boy lived in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi, and also suffered from leukemia and pneumonia, the AFP news agency said on Thursday.
Death of the H5N1 strain bird flu virus highlights a potential new risk for the world’s second most populous country battling the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 31 million people and killed more than 400,000 .
India has experienced more than half a dozen bird flu outbreaks in poultry over the past 20 years, all of which have been brought under control with no human cases reported in the country before.
Avian influenza mainly affects birds and poultry. In 2008, millions of poultry were slaughtered in India.
But cases of human-to-human transmission are extremely rare.
H5N1 first erupted in 1997, then spread between 2003 and 2011, while H7N9 was first detected in 2013.
Two strains of avian flu, H5N1 and H7N9, first discovered in 2013, have resulted in human contamination in Asia from infected birds.
H7N9 has infected 1,668 people and killed 616 since 2013, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
In the Indian case, the ministry said, the virus belonged to the H5Nx subtype, which was considered to be of concern because it was found to evolve into very dangerous strains.
China last month revealed its first human case of bird flu, and in February Russia detected the disease among workers at a poultry factory.
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