Health authorities in the United States announced, on Wednesday, that less than two months after the first case appeared, a second person was infected with bird flu in the United States, against the backdrop of an epidemic of this virus that spread among cattle herds in the country.
• Read also: Bird flu: No risk to Canadian dairy products
• Read also: Bird flu: Should we be concerned about milk contaminated with H5N1?
• Read also: Traces of the H5N1 virus have been detected in pasteurized milk in the United States
The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) said this new patient worked on a farm in Michigan where the H5N1 virus infected cows.
However, for health authorities, the risk assessment for the American population remains “low.”
The first case was announced in Texas, in the southern United States, on 1any April. This was “most likely” the first case of bird flu from a cow worldwide, according to the CDC.
The country’s first human case of bird flu was detected in 2022, in Colorado, but it was then an infection via poultry.
For the infected person in Michigan as in Texas, the patient only had eye symptoms, the CDC determines.
Experts are concerned about the growing number of mammals infected with the disease, although cases in humans remain rare.
There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission at the present time, but scientists fear that the high rate of spread may facilitate a mutation in the virus that allows it to transmit from one human to another.