“This case is very concerning for a number of reasons,” says Rick Bright, an American immunologist and vaccine researcher and a U.S. government health official from 2016 to 2020. “It’s in an otherwise healthy teenager. Like a similar case in Missouri, there’s no clear source for infection and no direct farm connection.”
As H5N1 bird flu continues to spread around the US, health officials recently found that 7 percent of dairy workers tested on farms in two states had evidence of recent infection — and some had signs of infection even when they didn’t feel sick.
Pigs are the ideal genetic mixing vessel to generate a human pandemic influenza strain, because they have receptors in their respiratory tracts which both avian and human flu viruses can bind to.
...finding bird flu in a pig raises worries that the virus may be hitting a stepping stone to becoming a bigger threat to people, said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Brown University pandemic researcher.
