Wyoming woman hospitalized with bird flu after virus kills her chickens – New York Post
A Wyoming woman has been hospitalized with the bird flu after her backyard chicken flock contracted the disease and died, state and federal health officials said. The Wyoming State Health Department said a Platte County woman tested positive for the H5N1 influenza on Friday, becoming the first human to contract the virus in the state’s history. While human cases of bird flu across the US often come with mild symptoms, Dr. Alexia Harrist, the state health officer and state epidemiologist, confirmed that the older woman in the Wyoming case had other health conditions that compounded the symptoms. “Unfortunately, this patient’s experience has been much more serious,” Harrist said in a statement. State health officials stressed that the woman likely contracted the virus due to her direct contact with the infected flock, noting that “there has been no documented human-to-human virus transmission of this virus in the United States so far.”Harrist said her team was quickly working to find anyone else who had contact with the patient and infected flock as they monitor the situation in the state. The bird flu and its different strains have been wreaking havoc on America’s poultry supply since 2022, leading to the culling of hundreds of millions of animals. There have been 70 confirmed human cases of the bird flu in the US over the past year, with the first death recorded last month in Louisiana, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The estimate is likely an undercount as new data shows that the bird flu has been silently spreading from animals to some veterinarians. Along with the jump to humans, the virus was detected for the first time in US dairy cows last year, infecting more than 960 cattle herds in at least 16 states. So far, experts have yet to detect a significant change in the bird virus and its different strains that could cause another Covid-19-type pandemic in the US. With Post wires
