Russian health officials on Saturday reported a new strain of avian flu before it spread from birds to humans after the first outbreak on a poultry farm last December.
The country’s head of public health, Anna Popova, has announced that seven cases of H5N8 strain have been found in poultry farm workers in southern Russia – health officials have warned the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Only time will tell how future change will overcome this obstacle,” Popova said in a televised comment on Saturday, Bloomberg reported.
Different strains of swine flu such as H5N1, H7N9 and H9N2 have been found in the global community – but Russia’s top health official said mild and infected individuals were not infected in all cases.
“The discovery of this strain now gives us all, the whole world, the potential to respond in a timely manner to possible change and to develop testing systems and vaccines,” he added.
WHO officials told Fox News that the infected were asymptomatic and no human infection had occurred at this time.
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Late last year there were reports of H5N8 strains in birds in at least 15 regions of Russia and cases were identified in China, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe.
Not all avian flu can infect humans, and health officials have previously said that poultry workers are more likely to become ill when working with infected or dead animals.
The most well-known avian flu strain, H5N1, has a mortality rate of 60 percent, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no infections have been reported in the USA yet.
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However the WHO has said that only “sometimes” cases of avian flu are found in humans.
But a WHO spokesman told Fox News, “We are in discussions with national authorities to gather more information and assess the public health impact of the event.”
