(OPINION) Have you heard about what is going on in Cambodia? If officials confirm that the H5N1 strain of the bird flu really is spreading from human to human there, it is likely to set off a wave of panic all over the globe.
And if the human-to-human transmission were to start happening in multiple countries, we would have a real nightmare on our hands. We just went through a pandemic that had a very low death rate, but it still paralyzed much of the world for an extended period of time. So how would global authorities react if a disease that has a death rate of more than 50 percent in humans starts spreading like wildfire?
According to the World Health Organization, more than 50 percent of the humans that have tested positive for H5N1 over the past two decades have died.
The good news is that it has been very difficult for humans to become infected. During the past 20 years, there have been less than a thousand confirmed cases.
So even though H5N1 has resulted in the deaths of about 200 million birds worldwide since December 2021, health authorities just kept assuring us that the risk to humans was low.
But now everything may be changing. In recent weeks, we have seen H5N1 mutate and start to spread among various types of mammals, and that has deeply alarmed many experts. For example, the following comes from an article posted by Johns Hopkins University…
In particular, the jump from birds to mammals—including foxes, bears, mink, whales, and seals—is “significant and something to pay attention to,” says Davis, an associate professor in environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“What people may not remember from high school biology is that there are larger differences between birds and mammals than there are among mammals, so finding the virus in mammals indicates an expanded host range.”
Earlier this month, I posted an article that discussed many of the mammal deaths that we have been seeing all over the planet. In particular, the fact that H5N1 is spreading among minks is especially noteworthy, because minks have respiratory systems that are very similar to humans. So that brings us to what is happening in Cambodia.
It is being reported that an 11-year-old girl has died after contracting H5N1… Health officials in Prey Veng province have confirmed the death of an 11-year-old girl from H5N1, Cambodia’s first known human “bird flu” infection since 2014.
Panharith Seng, director of the Prey Veng provincial health department, told VOA Khmer on Thursday that many chickens and ducks in the area where the girl lived had died of H5N1. We are being told that she was first diagnosed on February 16th and that she died shortly thereafter… She became ill on February 16 and was sent to be treated at a hospital in the capital. (READ MORE)
