Bird flu keeps rewriting the textbooks. It’s why scientists are unsettled by the U.S. dairy cattle outbreak
T wenty-seven years ago today, a 3-year-old boy in Hong Kong developed a sore throat, spiked a fever, and started to cough. Six days later, he was hospitalized; six days after that, he died of acute respiratory distress caused by viral pneumonia. Testing showed the toddler, who’d had contact with sick chickens before becoming ill, had been infected with H5N1 bird flu.
His death was the first attributed to a bird flu virus, and since then, dozens more young children across a number of countries have died from this bird flu virus, H5N1. In fact, in the weeks that followed the boy’s death, 17 other children in Hong Kong contracted the virus and five more died. It was a tragedy — and a profound shock for the scientists who studied influenza.
Until 1997, it was thought avian flu viruses didn’t infect people very often, and when they did, at most they caused exceedingly mild disease. That was what was seen when scientists experimentally infected human volunteers with three different bird flu viruses — not H5N1 — about 35 years ago.
