But the very changes that have allowed the virus to infect wild birds so efficiently likely made it harder to infect human cells, leading disease experts told Reuters. Their views underpin global health officials' assessments that the current outbreak of H5N1 poses low risk to people.
Unlike earlier outbreaks, this subtype of H5N1 is not causing significant disease in people. So far, only about a half dozen cases have been reported to the World Health Organization in people who had close contact with infected birds, and most of those have been mild. "It's clear that this is a very, very successful virus for birds, and that almost excludes it from being a very, very successful virus in mammals," said Richard Webby, director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds at St. Jude Children's Hospital.
"It is highly plausible that a virus capable of mink-to-mink transmission is capable of human-to-human transmission," Michelle Wille, an expert in the dynamics of wild bird viruses at the University of Sydney, said in an email. Using so-called gain of function experiments, scientists intentionally altered the H5N1 virus to make it transmissible in ferrets and found that as few as five highly specific mutations were required.
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