The World Health Organization (WHO) today expressed its “tremendous concern” over the growing spread of the strain H5N1 of bird flu in other species, including humans.

“It remains, I think, (a cause of) enormous concern,” WHO chief scientist Jeremy Farrar said during a news conference from Geneva.

The fear is that the H5N1 virus, which humans contracted after contact with sick animals had “extremely high mortality rate“, I will adapt and will be capable of transmission from human to human.

“It’s tragic to say this, but if I get infected with H5N1 and die, that’s the end of it,” he said, breaking the chain of transmission. “If I go around the community and spread the virus to another person, I start a new cycle,” Farrar said.

Beyond tracking people infected by animals – cows in a recent case in the US—“it is even more important to understand how many infections there are in people without them knowing it, because in this way the adaptation” of the virus will take place, Farrar explained.

There is currently no evidence that H5N1 has been transmitted from person to person, and cases of transmission of the virus to humans are very rare.

Almost half of the patients die from the virus

From the beginning of 2023 to April 1, 2024, the WHO announced that it recorded in 23 countries a total of 889 cases of bird flu in humans and 463 deathsi.e. mortality rate 52%.

In early April, US authorities announced that a man had tested positive for bird flu after being infected by a cow in Texas.

In the US, the patient had “red eyes as the only symptom”, authorities said, adding that he was placed in isolation and given an antiviral drug used for the flu.

A nine-year-old child, a carrier of the H5N1 strain, died of bird flu in Cambodia in February, while three more deaths from the same disease were recorded in the country in 2023.