Mexico reports its first human H5N1 avian flu case

News brief

Mexico’s government on April 4 reported the country’s first human H5N1 avian flu infection, which involves a 3-year-old girl who is hospitalized in serious condition.

The girl is from Durango state in northwest Mexico. She was treated with oseltamivir in the hospital in the city of Torreón.

So far the source of the girl’s infection isn’t known. The country’s agriculture ministry hasn’t reported any H5N1 outbreak at commercial farms. Wild bird sampling was conducted around the girl’s home and permanent surveillance was set up to track wildlife detections in the area.

The Durango state government said the girl is from the city of Gomez Palacio and that her parents have been evaluated and have tested negative for the virus, according to a statement translated and posted by FluTrackers, an infectious disease news message board.

Virus recently found in wild birds in Durango state

Mexico’s most recent H5N1 avian flu notification to the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) involved detections in the first part of February in a flock of wild geese at a body of water in Durango state. The WOAH report said the nearest poultry production site was about 16 miles from where the outbreak in geese occurred. In late January, the virus was reported in captive vultures at a zoo in Durango state.

In May 2024, Mexico reported a fatal human avian flu infection from a different strain, H5N2, which involved a 59-year-old man who had underlying health conditions and had no known exposure to poultry.

UK reports clade 1b mpox case with no travel history or links to earlier cases

News brief

Lisa Schnirring

The United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency (HSA) today announced that a clade 1b mpox infection has been confirmed in a person who has no travel history and has no reported links to earlier confirmed cases.

“More work is ongoing to determine where the individual, who is resident in the North East of England, may have caught the infection,” the group said in a statement, adding that the illness was diagnosed in March and no other infections were found among the patient’s contacts.

All of the country’s earlier cases involved people who had traveled to an outbreak country or had contact with someone who did.

On March 19, the country declared that it no longer considers clade 1 mpox a high consequence infectious disease, based on low mortality and availability of interventions. The HSA said the risk to the UK population remains low.

The novel clade 1b virus was first identified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2024 and is thought to spread more easily among contacts, including in household settings.