A California child has been diagnosed with bird flu, the first reported case in a US minor, health officials confirmed on Friday.
The child had mild symptoms, was treated with antiviral medication and is recovering, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in announcing the test results. No details about the child have been released, except that they live in Alameda county, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, and attend day care.
“It’s natural for people to be concerned, and we want to reinforce for parents, caregivers and families that based on the information and data we have, we don’t think the child was infectious – and no human-to-human spread of bird flu has been documented in any country for more than 15 years,” said Dr Tomás Aragón, the state’s public health director.
The infection brings the reported number of US bird flu cases this year to 55, including 29 in California, the CDC said. H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely in the US among wild birds, poultry and a number of other animals over the last few years.
The virus has killed at least 280 million poultry birds since 2021, and caused the largest sudden loss of the world’s wild birds in decades. It has spread as far as the Antarctic region – where it has led to mass deaths of elephant seals and fur seals.
It began spreading in US dairy cattle in March. California, the nation’s top dairy producer, has become the center of the US outbreak. Since August, the state has detected 402 herds infected – 65% of the 616 herds confirmed with the virus in 15 states.
Most of the people infected in California were farm workers who tested positive with mild symptoms. Farm workers face the most significant risk of contracting the virus from sick animals. Recent research from the CDC found that bird flu infections among dairy workers were much higher than the number of known cases.
Experts have warned there is a significant need for more testing and training for farm workers to protect themselves from the illness.
“We are not doing enough to make sure that we are protecting people from getting infected and certainly making sure that people who are infected get access to medicines that could potentially keep them from getting severely ill,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the 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 at a farm and having had no known contact with an infected animal. It remains a mystery how that person was infected – health officials have said there was no evidence of it spreading between people. A British Columbia teen was also recently hospitalized with bird flu, Canadian officials have said.
Officials said they were investigating how the child in California was infected. California health officials previously said in a statement that they were looking into a “possible exposure to wild birds”.
There is no evidence bird flu spread from the child to other people.
People in the child’s household reported having similar symptoms, but their test results were negative for bird flu. Health officials noted the child and the household members also tested positive for other common respiratory viruses. There is no indication of a larger outbreak, California health officials said in a statement this week.
