An 11-year-old girl in Cambodia has died following being infected by a strain of avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu, the government says.
It was the first known human infection with the H5N1 strain in the country since 2014, the health minister, Mam Bunheng, said in a statement on Thursday.
The girl from Prey Veng province, east of the capital, Phnom Penh, was diagnosed with bird flu following falling sick with a high fever and cough on 16 February, the statement said.
When her condition deteriorated, she was transferred to the national children’s hospital in Phnom Penh for treatment, but died on Wednesday, the health ministry said.
Since early last year, bird flu has ravaged farms around the world, leading to the deaths of more than 200 million birds because of the disease or mass culls, the World Organisation for Animal Health said recently.
The World Health Organisation earlier this month noted the spread to mammals of H5N1 influenza, but said the risk to humans remained low.
H5N1 had spread among poultry and wild birds for 25 years, the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a briefing, but recent reports of infections in mink, otters and sealions “need to be monitored closely”.
For the moment, WHO assesses the risk to humans as low, and since H5N1 first emerged in 1996 there has only been rare and non-sustained transmission of the strain to and between humans. The girl lived near a conservation area, and health officials have taken samples from a dead bird there.
Humans who have been infected with bird flu in the past have usually worked on poultry farms or been in close contact with infected birds.
Cambodian health authorities urged people in the south-east Asian country not to handle dead or sick animals and birds, and to contact a hotline if anyone suspected they had been infected by the disease.
Additional reporting by Melissa Davey
