China’s National Health Commission (NHC) has on Tuesday reported the country’s first case of human infection with the H10N3 strain of bird flu.
According to a statement by the NHC, the affected man was hospitalized on April 28 after contracting fever and other symptoms.
He was diagnosed as having the H10N3 avian influenza virus on May 28, the statement said. However, it does not give details on how the man contaminated the virus.
H10N3 is a less severe strain of the virus in poultry and the risk of it spreading on a large scale was very low, the NHC added.
Moreover, many different virus strains other than avian influenza are present in China and some sporadically affect people. There have been no significant numbers of human infections with bird flu since the H7N9 strain killed around 300 people during 2016-2017.
No other cases of human infection with H10N3 have previously been reported globally, the NHC said.
Earlier in 2020, China had confirmed its first case of coronavirus variant that was recently detected in the United Kingdom (UK).
The US reported a record number of deaths from COVID-19, with more than 3,900 people dead, bringing the toll since the pandemic began to more than 19.7 million infections and 341,000 lives lost.
China had alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) to several cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people.
Several of those infected worked at the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which was shut down on January 1.
On January 5, Chinese officials had ruled out the possibility that this was a recurrence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus – an illness that originated in China and killed more than 770 people worldwide in 2002-2003.
