California child becomes first minor reported with case of bird flu
A California child has been diagnosed with bird flu, the first reported case in a U.S. minor, health officials confirmed Friday.
The child had mild symptoms, was treated with antiviral medications and is recovering, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in announcing the test results. No details about the child have been released other than that they live in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, and attend day care.
“It is normal for people to be concerned, and we want to make it clear to parents, carers and families that, based on the information and data we have, we do not believe the child was infectious – and that there is no spread of birds from person to person. In any country, the flu has been documented for more than 15 years,” said Dr. Tomás Aragón, the state’s public health director.
The infection brings the reported number of cases of bird flu in the U.S. this year to 55, including 29 in California, the CDC said. H5N1 bird flu has spread widely in the US in recent years among wild birds, poultry and a number of other animals.
The virus has killed at least 280 million poultry birds since 2021, causing the world’s largest sudden loss of wild birds in decades. The disease has spread as far as the Antarctic region, where it has caused mass deaths of elephant seals and fur seals.
The disease began spreading among U.S. dairy cattle in March. California, the nation’s largest dairy producer, has become the center of the U.S. outbreak. Since August, the state has detected 402 infected herds – 65% of the 616 herds in 15 states confirmed the virus.
Most of the people infected in California were farm workers who tested positive with mild symptoms. Farmworkers are most at risk of contracting the virus from sick animals. Recent research from the CDC found that bird flu infections among dairy workers far exceeded the number of known cases.
Experts have warned there is a dire need for more testing and training for farm workers to protect themselves from the disease.
“We are not doing enough to ensure that we protect people from infection and certainly not ensuring that people who are infected have access to medicines that could potentially prevent them from becoming seriously ill,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center . and a professor of epidemiology at Brown University School of Public Health, told the Guardian earlier this month.
In Missouri, an adult contracted the virus despite not working on a farm and having no known contact with an infected animal. It remains a mystery how that person became infected — health officials have said there is no evidence the disease is spreading among people. A British Columbia teen was also recently hospitalized with bird flu, Canadian officials said.
Officials said they were investigating how the child came to be infected in California. Health officials in California previously said in a statement that they were investigating a “possible exposure to wild birds.”
There is no evidence that bird flu spreads from the child to other people.
People in the child’s household reported having similar symptoms, but their test results came back negative for bird flu. Health officials noted that the child and household members also tested positive for other common respiratory viruses. There is no evidence of a larger outbreak, California health officials said in a message statement this week.