The first patient sick with bird flu in the US dies.

He had been hospitalized for a respiratory condition and was in “critical condition,” health authorities reported in December, when his hospitalization was made public.

He had “contracted the H5N1 virus after being exposed to poultry and wild birds», declared the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) on Monday.

“The extensive public health investigation conducted by LDH has not identified any additional cases of H5N1 or evidence of human-to-human transmission. “This patient remains the only human case of H5N1 in Louisiana,” he added on his website.

For these reasons, it considers that the risk to public health posed by avian flu remains “low.”

“People who work with birds, poultry or cows, or who are exposed to these animals as part of their leisure activities, are at increased risk,” he added.

For several months now, The United States faces an epizootic -the equivalent of an epidemic in animals- of bird flu.

At the same time, 66 cases of avian flu in humans have been detected in the country, the vast majority of them mild. Others may have gone unnoticed.

The genetic sequence has shown that the H5N1 virus with which the deceased patient was infected was different from that detected in several herds of dairy cows and poultry farms.

A part of it found in the patient’s throat showed genetic modifications that suggested it had mutated within the body to adapt to the human respiratory tract, US health authorities announced at the end of December.

According to the World Health Organization, human deaths related to the H5N1 virus have been reported in other countries in the past.

Avian influenza A (H5N1) first appeared in 1996, but since 2020 outbreaks in birds have skyrocketed and more and more mammal species are affected.