Bird Flu in Cambodia
The World Health Organization is looking into two human cases of avian influenza in Cambodia after an 11-year-old girl died following an infection and after her father also tested positive for the H5N1 strain. The cases are the first known human infections of the bird flu in the Southeast Asian country since 2014.
The development comes against the backdrop of a global bird flu outbreak since October 2021, including in the US where a record of more than 58 million birds have died since last February, pushing up egg prices. The flu normally spreads between sick poultry, which have a nearly 100% mortality rate when infected, and may occasionally spread from poultry to humans given sufficient exposure. The WHO currently assesses the threat to humans as low. See how the virus spreads here.
The H5N1 bird flu virus was first detected in 1996 in southern China, leading to an outbreak in the country and Hong Kong in 1997, when six people died (see visual timeline). Since 2003, more than 20 countries have reported roughly 870 human infections with the H5N1 strain, of which 457 have died.
