AFP :
The World Health Organization voiced alarm Thursday (18 April) at the growing spread of H5N1 bird flu to new species, including humans, who face an “extraordinarily high” mortality rate.
“This remains I think an enormous concern,” the UN health agency’s chief scientist Jeremy Farrar told reporters in Geneva.
The current bird flu outbreak began in 2020 and has led to the deaths of tens of millions of poultry, with wild birds also infected as well as land and marine mammals.
Cows and goats joined the list last month — a surprising development for experts because they were not thought susceptible to this type of influenza.
The A (H5N1) strain has become “a global zoonotic animal pandemic”, Farrar said.
“The great concern of course is that in… infecting ducks and chickens and then increasingly mammals, that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans and then critically the ability to go from human to human.”
