A 13-year-old girl in British Columbia who was hospitalized with bird flu for several weeks late last year harbored a mutated version of the virus, according to a report published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine . The case was Canada’s first recorded human infection of avian influenza, which has infected at least 66 people in the United States since last March, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This includes the nation’s first severe case , in Louisiana in December.
So far, nearly all of the cases of bird flu in North America have been mild, with symptoms including conjunctivitis, or pink eye, and runny nose, chills, cough and sore throat. “I think it’s concerning but not totally surprising that we would see some sporadic cases where there is severe illness. Even seasonal influenza can occasionally cause very severe illness,” said Dr.
Chanu Rhee, an infectious disease and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School. For now, the Canadian teen and the patient in Louisiana are outliers, but the infections illustrate the virus’s ability to cause severe illness — and demonstrates how, during long illnesses, the virus has the chance to mutate to better infect humans . In both of those cases, virus samples showed that once it was in the body, it mutated in ways that would allow it to stick to cells in the mucous membrane lining the uppe.
