US reports first bird flu-related death after 65-year-old succumbs in Louisiana

A US patient who had been hospitalised with H5N1 bird flu has died, the Louisiana Department of Health said on Monday, marking the country’s first reported human death from the virus.

The patient, who has not been identified, was hospitalised with the virus on December 18 after exposure to a combination of backyard chickens and wild birds, Louisiana health officials had said.

The patient was over the age of 65 and had underlying medical conditions, officials said, putting the patient at higher risk for serious disease.

Nearly 70 people in the US have contracted bird flu since April, most of them farmworkers, as the virus has circulated among poultry flocks and dairy herds, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Federal and state officials have said the risk to the general public remains low.

The ongoing bird flu outbreak, which began in poultry in 2022, has killed nearly 130 million wild and domestic poultry and has sickened 917 dairy herds, according to the CDC and the US Department of Agriculture.

An analysis of the virus taken from the Louisiana patient showed it belongs to the D1.1 genotype – the same type that has recently been detected in wild birds and poultry in Washington State, as well as a recent severe case in a teen in British Columbia, Canada, according to the CDC.

It is different from the B3.13 genotype currently circulating in U.S. dairy cows, which has mostly been associated with mild symptoms in human cases including conjunctivitis, or pink eye.

The CDC said the risk to the general public remains low. Experts have been looking for signs that the virus is acquiring the ability to spread easily from person to person, but the CDC said there is no evidence of that.

People who work with birds, poultry, cows, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk, Louisiana health officials said in a statement.

Worldwide, more than 950 human cases of bird flu have been reported to the World Health Organisation, and about half have resulted in death.

“Though H5N1 cases in the US have been uniformly mild, the virus does have the capacity to cause severe disease and death in certain cases,” said Dr Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Several experts said the death was concerning, but not surprising.

“This is a tragic reminder of what experts have been screaming for months, H5N1 is a deadly virus,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

“I hate to have the death of somebody be a wake-up call,” said Gail Hansen, a veterinary and public health consultant.

“But if that’s what it takes, hopefully that will make people look at bird flu a little more carefully and say this really is a public health issue we need to be looking at more closely.”