Bird flu spillover ‘concerning’, doctor warns – as virus in girl who

The bird flu virus isolated from a girl who died from the disease had mutations that made it better adapted to human cells, Sky News has learned.

The 11-year-old is believed to have been infected by poultry kept by her family in Prey Veng province, in the south of Cambodia.

Her father also tested positive for the H5N1 virus, but did not develop symptoms.

Dr Erik Karlsson, who led the team at the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia that decoded the genetic sequence of the girl’s virus, said it differed from samples taken from birds.

“There are some indications that this virus has gone through a human,” he revealed in an exclusive interview.

“Any time these viruses get into a new host they’ll have certain changes that allow them to replicate a little bit better or potentially bind to the cells in our respiratory tract a little bit better.”

He said the mutations were unlikely to have occurred in the girl, but probably existed in a “cloud” of viruses with random genetic changes inside birds.

“Just getting into a new host allows those one or two viruses in that cloud to survive better and become the dominant population,” he said.

Read more:
Bird flu has jumped to mammals – how worried should humans be?
Don’t assume risk to humans will remain low, WHO warns

But Dr Karlsson added that the virus had yet to fully adapt to humans. “It’s still a bird virus,” he said.

The virus’s genetic material was sequenced in just 24 hours using technology developed by UK company Oxford Nanopore.

It showed the virus was the 2.3.2.1c variant of H5N1, which is endemic in wild birds and poultry in Cambodia, and not the 2.3.4.4b strain that has spread rapidly around the world and begun to infect some mammals.

But Dr Karlsson said it would be wrong to downplay the threat from the variant in Cambodia.