He doctor in Veterinary Medicine Víctor Neira explained in Cooperative that in the world there are “several viruses” of avian influenza that could cause health problems in the future, but he clarified that these are not yet capable of being transmitted between humans.
The alarm was turned on again after the World Health Organization reported the day before the first human death from AH5N2 bird flu in the world: a 59-year-old man who died on April 24 in Mexico, and the source of the infection is unknown. exposure to the virus, reported in poultry.
Neira pointed out in What’s left of the day that “it is important to emphasize that this case It affected a person who had quite a few comorbidities, who was hospitalized even before that the disease attacked him, therefore, he was not a healthy person and he died associated with this flu condition.
Likewise, he specified that “the one circulating in the world is not H5N2, but H5N1, of high pathogenicity”, the latter affected thousands of animals last year in Chile.
H5N1 “is a virus that is distributed globally, but Fortunately this year, at the national level, there have been no detections, at least reported by the SAG, therefore we speak of there being an epidemiological silence. of this virus, we are not observing cases like last year,” he highlighted. However, “it is a virus that is causing recurrent outbreaks worldwide, especially in the industrial sector.”
For its part, “H5N2 had already been reported in Mexico, it was causing outbreaks with low damage to poultry, but also spreading and with cases of high pathogenicity, which causes massive mortality in them. So it is a virus that must be take into account and be observing”.
The academic from the University of Chile also pointed out that “It is always theorized that a new pandemic could be caused by an avian influenza virus, of which there are many, there is great variability, some of low and others of high pathogenicity”, and that “In the world of influenza there are several viruses that could lurk and cause problems in the future.“.
However, considering the background that “this person who died had many direct contacts and all of them have been negative for the presence of the virus,” he revealed that this “confirms that Someone can get sick from an avian influenza virus, which is quite rare, but human-to-human transmission is not feasible; that is a step that these viruses have not been able to do“.
