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A 79-year-old man named Alan Gosling, who raised pet ducks at his home in Devon, England, recently became the first UK resident to catch the H5N1 strain of bird flu, DevonLive reported.
A flock of over 100 ducks lived outside on Gosling’s property in Buckfastleigh, and after feeding the animals for a while, Gosling brought 20 of the ducks to his house to keep them as pets. In December 2021, a few of the ducks in the outer flock became ill, Gosling noted. The Ministry of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) then carried out tests on the birds and found positive cases of H5N1 avian influenza. The whole flock, including Gosling’s 20 domestic ducks, was slaughtered shortly after Christmas, The keeper reported.
Gosling was then tested for several strains of bird flu and came back positive for H5N1. He is currently under quarantine at home and feels “absolutely fine but very lonely,” he said. The Mid-Devon Advertiser.
Related: 11 (sometimes) deadly diseases that have jumped across species
“The past two weeks have been hell for this family,” Ellesha Gosling, Gosling’s daughter-in-law, told DevonLive. “He saw all of his ducks killed, and they were like his closest friends.”
Although the H5N1 strain of avian influenza primarily infects birds, on the rare occasions when it jumps to humans, it can cause serious illness and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health agencies are closely monitoring new human cases of H5N1 because, if the virus mutates in a way that allows it to spread easily between people, the pathogen could have “pandemic potential.” So far, no sustained community spread of the strain has ever been detected.
The British Health Security Agency (UKHSA) reported on Thursday (January 6) that a person had tested positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu in the south-west of England, but had not disclosed the name of the individual at the time, The Guardian has previously reported. “Transmission of bird flu from bird to human is very rare and has only occurred a small number of times in the UK before,” a UKHSA statement noted.
“This will clearly be great news, but the bottom line is that human H5N1 infections are really rare and almost always occur as a result of direct and long-term contact with poultry,” Mike Tildesley, professor of infectious disease modeling at the University of Warwick, told The Guardian at the time. “There has never been any evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission of H5N1, so at this time I would not consider this a significant public health risk.”
The UKHSA has confirmed that “All of the individual’s contacts, including those who visited the premises, have been traced and that there is no evidence that the infection has spread to anyone. Other. The individual is currently doing well and is self-isolating, “DevonLive reported.
Read more about the case in DevonLive and The Guardian.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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