Detroit Free Press Whether it spread from sick cows or sick poultry to people, the type of H5N1 avian flu virus that infected a commercial poultry worker in Colorado earlier this month is very similar to the virus that sickened a Michigan dairy farmworker in May, according to new genetic sequencing test results released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And that’s good news, said CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen, who visited Michigan this week to talk with local and state health leaders about efforts to better understand how the highly contagious virus is spreading to humans, whether it is mutating to become more dangerous or causing asymptomatic infections.
“We are taking the cases of avian flu that we are seeing very seriously, but I want folks to know the overall risk right now to the population is low,” Cohen told the Free Press during a Tuesday morning visit to an immunization clinic at the DMC Children’s Hospital of Michigan Specialty Center in Detroit. “That’s because we’ve never seen a human-to-human transmission of that virus. But we also learned very much through COVID that these viruses like to change. So our work is now to make sure we’re giving that virus less opportunity to change and potentially then become something that can transmit humans to human.”