Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Amid the raging controversy over the origins of the pandemic and whether the coronavirus causing Covid-19 jumped from animals to humans, China has reported the first-ever case of human infection with the H10N3 strain of bird flu anywhere in the world.
On Tuesday, this rare case came to light from the country’s eastern Jiangsu province, China’s National Health Commission said.
The patient, a 41-year-old man from Zhenjiang city, is currently in a stable condition and meets discharge standards, the state-run CGTN TV reported.
Health authorities played down the outbreak, saying the case was a sporadic virus transmission from poultry to humans, and the risk of causing a pandemic was extremely low.
The patient was diagnosed as being afflicted with the H10N3 avian influenza virus on May 28, National Health Commission said in a statement without elaborating on how the man had got infected with the virus.
H10N3 is a low pathogenic or relatively less severe strain of the virus in poultry and the risk of it spreading on a large scale is very low, media reported.
There are many different strains of avian influenza in China and some sporadically infect people, generally those working with poultry.
H5N8 is a subtype of the Influenza A virus (also known as the bird flu virus). While H5N8 only presents a low risk to humans, it is highly lethal to wild birds and poultry.
In April, a highly pathogenic H5N6 avian flu was found in wild birds in northeast China’s Shenyang city.
