UK confirms ‘rare’ human case of bird flu; US reports first H5N9 outbreak in poultry

British health authorities said they had detected a case of bird flu (H5N1) in a person in central England.

The person acquired the infection on a farm, where they had close and prolonged contact with numerous infected birds, the UK Health Security Agency said.

The risk to the wider public continues to be very low, it added.

Meanwhile, the United States has reported its first outbreak of H5N9 bird flu in poultry on a duck farm in California, the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) said on Monday.

US authorities also detected the more common H5N1 strain on the same farm in Merced County, California, they said in a report to Paris-based WOAH, adding that the almost 119,000 birds on the farm had been killed since December 2.

Highly pathogenic bird flu (HPAI), commonly called bird flu, has spread around the globe in recent years, leading to the culling of hundreds of millions of poultry. It also spread to dozens of mammal species, including dairy cows in the US, and killed a person in Louisiana.