Corona Calls for 01.13.2025 – A human death from bird flu

KPFA - Corona Calls

Discussed in this episode:

• H5N1 Avian Influenza has produced its first human death in the US.
• This was a different strain (D1.1) from what’s moving through dairy herds (B3.13). The victim is believed to have contracted the virus directly from bird flocks he kept in his yard.
• Virus samples from the victim showed genetic changes expected to make the virus better-able to attach to receptors in the human lung. The same changes were not present in samples collected from the victim’s birds, suggesting they emerged over the course of the victim’s infection.
• The good news: that means those mutations aren’t spreading in the wild. The bad: these types of mutations can emerge swiftly when people start getting infected.

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Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

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