The person in Washington is reportedly suffering from flu-like symptoms.
Several cases of the "old" bird flu, H5N1, have been detected in various places in the United States, among others, in recent years. The "new" one, H5N5, does not pose an increased risk to humans , according to the CDC . But each human case is an opportunity for the virus to mutate further, which in the long run could become dangerous.
"Every time someone gets infected with a new flu virus, we want to gather as much information as we can to make sure the virus hasn't evolved the ability to spread more easily to people, which could trigger a pandemic," Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the pandemic center at Brown University in Rhode Island, told The Los Angeles Times.
Both H5N1 and H5N5 have previously been detected in birds. H5N5 arrived in Sweden in 2020 and led to the culling of 1.3 million chickens in early 2021 after an outbreak on a farm in Kalmar County.
