Researchers still don’t know how a young BC teen got sick with a particularly nasty version of the bird flu virus.
New details published in The New England Journal of Medicine show the teen was 13, female, and overweight with a history of asthma. She recovered and no longer needed oxygen to help her breathe after December 18.
She was originally admitted on November 4 to hospital but was sent home without treatment. She was re-admitted on November 7 with respiratory distress and transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit at BC Children’s Hospital on November 8. She was treated for respiratory and kidney damage. Testing confirmed the virus in her system was the same as detected earlier in the year in wild BC birds.
After nearly a month of treatments she was transferred to the regular pediatric care ward on December 4 and had recovered enough by December 18 to no longer need supplementary oxygen.
The journal referred to 46 similar cases across the US this past year. Almost all of them were traced to farm workers who were exposed to infected animals on the job, either at poultry farms while handling sick animals or at dairy farms, mostly after exposure to raw milk.
However, sources of infection for a few cases, including the BC teen, remain unclear.
Researchers conclude that more work is needed to understand the virus, but overall the risk to most people in North America remains low and has caused no deaths.
They contrast North American cases with cases involving the same H5N1 virus in South Asia and Egypt, which has a fatality rate of 50%. Researchers say they don’t know why the virus has been fatal in those regions compared to cases in North America.
