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 emergency action that followed demonstrated the strength of Cambodia's disease tracking system and its importance to global biosurveillance systems.
This is the result of years of international and local investment, training and public education. This highlights how important frontline work in low-income countries is to the global system for detecting zoonoses, which are pathogens that cross 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 evolved to cause outbreaks in wild and captive birds, sometimes jumping onto 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. Could this be a new version of the virus that has returned to Asia and is killing people? Although the country hadn't had any such human cases for nearly a decade, scientists had discovered that the virus had been present in birds all that time.
Genetic analysis has shown that the virus infecting Cambodians is not from the Americas, but is a well-known subtype, which is reassuring. Still, Cambodia has reported 11 cases of bird flu over the past year, including five deaths, 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.
