Dr. Rucci blamed himself for not thinking to test the boy the day before, since he could have saved the boy’s life had he treated him for the flu.
But her warning and the urgent action that followed were testament to the strength of Cambodia’s disease tracking system and its importance in the global biosurveillance system.
This is the result of years of international and local investment, training and public education. This highlights how important front-line work in low-income countries is to the global system for detecting zoonoses, which are pathogens that travel between animals and humans, such as COVID-19. It shows what is happening. The goal is to identify and contain them, buying time to produce enough vaccines or drugs to treat them, or embark on a desperate mission to develop something new.
growing threat
H5N1 is one of many viruses that cause influenza in birds. It first appeared in Hong Kong in 1996 and has since caused outbreaks in wild and farmed birds, sometimes evolving into subspecies that infect humans.
In 2020, a particularly deadly new infectious disease spread along migration routes to parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe caught the attention of scientists.
By 2022, the virus has reached the Americas, killing wild and domestic animals, including livestock and marine mammals.
So when two people in Cambodia were reported to have been infected with H5N1 in February 2023, scientists were alarmed. Was this a new version of the virus that had returned to Asia and was killing people? The country hadn’t had any such human cases for nearly a decade, but scientists had found that the virus had been present in birds all that time.
To their relief, genetic analysis has shown that the virus infecting Cambodians is not from the Americas, but a well-known subtype. Nevertheless, Cambodia has reported 11 cases of avian flu in the past year, five of which have died, more than any other country in the world.
Global concerns about the H5N1 virus have increased in recent weeks after the virus was detected in goats and dairy cows in the United States and later sickened in a Texas farm worker.
As the virus moves from species to species, scientists are concerned that it could evolve to spread more easily from birds to mammals, as well as from person to person.