A 3-year-old girl has died in Mexico after becoming the country’s first confirmed human case of bird flu, health officials said on Tuesday.
The girl, from the western state of Durango, died early Tuesday in a hospital in Coahuila. She had severe breathing problems caused by the H5N1 virus, Mexico’s Health Ministry said in a statement.
It’s not clear how the girl got infected. Health officials tested 38 people who were in contact with the girl. All of them tested negative for bird flu.
Investigators are also testing wild birds around her home to find out.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says 70 people in the United States have tested positive for H5N1 in the past year, but the actual number could be higher.
Bird flu and intensive farming
H5N1 bird flu first appeared in 1996 and has spread globally, mostly among birds. Experts say the way animals are raised in intensive farming systems plays a significant role in this spread.
In factory farms, thousands of animals are kept close together in stressful and dirty conditions. These are ideal environments for viruses like H5N1 to grow, spread quickly, and mutate.
The virus can pass from bird to bird very fast, and when it mutates, it can become more dangerous—possibly even able to spread between humans. Scientists warn that if H5N1 mutates enough to spread easily between people, it could cause a pandemic similar to COVID-19.
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