{"id":10904,"date":"2025-11-26T18:18:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T00:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=10904"},"modified":"2025-11-26T18:18:39","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T00:18:39","slug":"first-human-dies-of-rare-h5n5-bird-flu-strain-heres-what-you-need-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/11\/26\/first-human-dies-of-rare-h5n5-bird-flu-strain-heres-what-you-need-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"First Human Dies of Rare H5N5 Bird Flu Strain. Here\u2019s What You Need to Know"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/first-human-dies-of-rare-h5n5-bird-flu-strain-heres-what-you-need-to-know\/\">American Scientific<\/a> A person in the Washington State has died of avian influenza. It\u2019s the first human death from&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/bird-flu\/\">bird flu<\/a>&nbsp;in the U.S. since January\u2014but the infection was of a different strain than the one that has been&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/eggs-hit-by-bird-flu-crisis-as-farmers-loose-flocks-to-virus\/\">devastating poultry farms<\/a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/bird-flu-is-killing-wildlife-and-experts-fear-the-ecological-toll\/\">wild animals<\/a>&nbsp;for the past several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Washington State Department of Health\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/doh.wa.gov\/newsroom\/grays-harbor-county-resident-dies-complications-avian-influenza\">announced the death on Friday<\/a>, noting that the person who died had been hospitalized since early November. The agency identified them as an older person with underlying health conditions who had backyard domestic birds. It also confirmed that the virus was of the subtype H5N5\u2014not the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/could-bird-flu-spread-between-humans-heres-what-it-would-take\/\">H5N1 strain that has caused 70 human infections and one death<\/a>\u00a0in the U.S. since 2024, as well as countless deaths of wild and domestic animals since it arrived in North America in late 2021. Many influenza viruses are identified by two classes of proteins that appear on their outer shells, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Each of these proteins comes in multiple forms, and different combinations of these two protein types are referred to as \u201csubtypes\u201d of virus. The long-circulating H5N1 virus and the H5N5 virus responsible for the recent human death have the same hemagglutinin protein (H5) on their outer shells but different neuraminidase proteins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fatality is not a reason to panic and does not suggest the risks of bird flu are larger than scientists have believed, says Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any reason to suspect H5N5 has more or less of a pandemic risk than H5N1, and similarly, we don\u2019t have any reason to suspect, as a whole, it causes more severe disease,\u201d he says. \u201cMost people\u2019s exposure to the H5 viruses is still going to be to the H5N1 just because there\u2019s so much more of that in the bird population.\u201d<\/p>\n<div style=\"display: none;\"><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" title=\" vQT m  p Cu T\"> vQT m  p Cu T<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American Scientific A person in the Washington State has died of avian influenza. It\u2019s the first human death from&nbsp;bird flu&nbsp;in the U.S. since January\u2014but the infection was of a different strain than the one that has been&nbsp;devastating poultry farms&nbsp;and&nbsp;wild animals&nbsp;for the past several years. The Washington State Department of Health\u00a0announced the death on Friday, noting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-avian-influenza"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10905,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10904\/revisions\/10905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}