Bird flu: Person with rare strain in US sparks alarm about cow transmission

A person in Texas has contracted a rare form of bird flu in the second ever human case recorded in the US.The patient appears to have contracted it from dairy cows—the first time the H5N1 virus has been found in cattle—sparking fears about a new mutation.Texas’s Department of State Health Services has said that the patient’s only symptom is conjunctivitis, a common symptom of bird flu. The patient is being treated with the antiviral oseltamivir (Tamiflu).The US Department of Agriculture has said that the risk to the public “remains low” and that “initial testing has not found changes to the virus that would make it more transmissible to humans”—a statement backed up by the National Veterinary Services Laboratories.1 Milk farms are instructed to destroy any milk from infected cows, and pasteurisation would kill off any virus and prevent it from entering the food chain, the Department of Agriculture told Stat…
Read Original Article: Bird flu: Person with rare strain in US sparks alarm about cow transmission »