She cursed herself for not thinking to check on the boy the day before, when Dr. Luch could have saved him if she had treated him for the flu.
But the alarm and urgency she raised is a testament to the strength of Cambodia’s disease surveillance system and its importance to the global biosurveillance system.
It is the fruit of years of international and domestic investment, training and public education. This shows how front-line work in low-income countries is critical to the global system to combat zoonotic diseases – pathogens that jump between animals and humans, as Covid-19 has done. The goal is to identify them and buy time to develop enough vaccines or drugs to treat them, or embark on a daring mission to develop something new.
A growing threat
H5N1 is one of the viruses that cause influenza in birds. In the year It first appeared in Hong Kong in 1996 and has since caused outbreaks in wild and farmed birds, and has occasionally jumped to humans.
In the year In 2020, a new, particularly deadly, virus spread along migration routes to parts of Africa, Asia and Europe, attracting the attention of scientists.
In the year By 2022, it had reached North and South America and was killing wild and domestic animals, livestock and marine mammals.
Therefore, scientists predict that by February 2023, Cambodia will be free of HIV. Was this the new version of the virus that came back to Asia and killed people? Although scientists knew that the virus was present in birds all those years, there were no such human cases in the country for about a decade.
Genetic analysis confirmed that the virus infecting Cambodians was not the one in America, but a common subtype — a relief. However, in the past year, Cambodia has reported 11 cases of bird flu and five deaths; This is more than anywhere else in the world.
In the United States, the virus was found in goats and dairy cows, and then in a Texas farm worker who became infected with HIV.
As the virus moves between species, scientists fear that the virus could easily spread from person to person, not just from birds to mammals.