A man in eastern China has contracted what appears to be the first human case of H10N3, a type of avian influenza, according to Chinese regime officials.
The 41-year-old man, who wasn’t identified, was hospitalized in late April with H10N3 in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, located near Shanghai, according to China’s National Health Commission in a statement on its website.
The commission stated that no other cases have been reported.
“This infection is an accidental cross-species transmission,” its statement said, while also claiming that “the risk of large-scale transmission is low,” according to a Chinese-to-English translation.
The agency stated that the man developed a fever and other symptoms; he was diagnosed with H10N3 about a month later, on May 28.
Filip Claes, the regional laboratory coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organization, told the Reuters news agency that this strain of bird flu is “not a very common virus.”
Over the years, several strains of bird flu have been found among animals in China, although reports of mass outbreaks among humans are rare.
The last human epidemic involving a bird flu strain, H7N9, occurred in China in 2016 and 2017. H7N9, which has a relatively high mortality rate, has infected some 1,700 people and killed 613 since 2013, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
Last year, Chinese health officials reported outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu, including one that forced the culling of 18,000 chickens in Hunan Province.
The reports of H10N3 being contracted in China come as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has faced increasing scrutiny from U.S. officials about the origins of the CCP virus, otherwise known as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and whether it leaked or was researched at a lab in Wuhan. CCP officials have long said that the virus was transmitted from an animal to humans
