A 41-year-old man in China has become the first known human to be infected with a rare bird flu strain called H10N3.
Authorities did not explain exactly how he got infected, but experts believe this strain does not spread easily from person to person.
The man lives in Jiangsu province. He was hospitalized on April 28 and diagnosed about a month later. He has now recovered and is expected to leave the hospital soon.
There are many types of bird flu, and sometimes people who work closely with poultry can get infected. Health officials checked people who had contact with the patient but did not find any other infections.
China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said that no other human cases of H10N3 have ever been reported worldwide. They believe this infection was a rare case where the virus passed from birds to a human, and the risk of a large outbreak is extremely low.
Officials also said the H10N3 strain is considered low-pathogenic, meaning it usually does not cause serious illness in birds and is unlikely to spread quickly.
The World Health Organization (WHO) also said that there is currently no evidence that this virus spreads from human to human.
However, the WHO noted that as long as bird flu viruses exist in poultry, occasional human infections can happen, reminding the world that the risk of a future flu pandemic still exists.
At the moment, another bird flu strain called H5N8 is spreading among birds in several European countries, leading to hundreds of thousands of poultry being culled. In February, Russia reported the first human infection with that strain.
Human infections with bird flu are quite rare, especially since the H7N9 outbreak in 2016–2017, which killed around 300 people.
