B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says the teenager in Children’s Hospital with Canada’s first presumptive case of avian flu is in critical condition.
Henry said the teen was admitted late on Friday and their condition varied over the weekend but that as of Tuesday they had taken a turn for the worst.
It was first reported over the weekend that the teenager was at B.C. Children’s Hospital with a suspected case of H5N1 bird flu.
“Their initial symptoms started, not surprisingly, with conjunctivitis,” Henry said.
“So infection in the eyes, fever and cough, and those are really the hallmarks. It’s very difficult early on to determine if that is from influenza from COVID, from other respiratory viruses. So it really was this surveillance network that we have in place and the testing that was done that led us to identify the H5N1 in this person.”
Health officials are assuring the public they are working to figure out how the patient acquired the infection and who else they might have contacted. Henry said they are confident at this point, given the contract tracing and the length of exposure that they have not identified anyone else who may be infected.
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Henry said that the province has a robust system in place to test for suspected viruses.
“It’s called a presumptive positive because to be confirmed as a truly positive, even though we have confidence absolutely in the PCR tests that are done at the BC CDC lab, it needs to be confirmed at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg,” Henry added.
“Those samples are on their way to Winnipeg and we are likely to have that confirmation in the next hours or days.”
The teenager likely caught the virus from a bird or animal, the province said in a statement over the weekend.
Health officials are urging everyone to stay up to date with their vaccines and to practise good hygiene and wash their hands regularly.
Henry said the next step is to determine if anyone else is sick.
“The contact tracing over the past few days to make sure that there are not other cases out there that we’re missing to make sure that people who have been in contact with this young person during their infectious period are assessed, are tested and all of the people who have been in contact, either at home or in the hospital, are notified,” she added.
However, Henry said there is a possibility that health officials may not be able to determine a source of the infection.
“At this point, we have a number of leads that we’re following and we will be tracking down everyone,” she added.
H5 bird flu is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows, with several recent human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers.
Human-to-human transmission is rare and there has been no evidence of sustained transmission between humans, according to Health Canada.
It is an airborne virus and cannot be contracted from eating eggs or chicken.
Henry said there had been one other human case in Canada in Alberta in 2014. However, she said they had likely acquired it when they were travelling in China and this teen is the first presumptive human case of avian flu that has been acquired in Canada.
She added that in the U.S., there have been 46 confirmed human cases but almost all of them have been in dairy workers when the virus got into dairy herds, most recently in Oregon, Washington and California.
“We have not yet seen H5N1 infections in dairy cattle here in our dairy cows in Canada or in B.C.,” Henry said.
