Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that hospitals speed up testing people who are hospitalized with the flu for H5N1 bird flu.
Health care workers in hospitals are urged to perform additional testing on patients hospitalized with influenza A — ideally within 24 hours of admission — to determine whether they have bird flu, according to a CDC advisory issued Thursday.
The advisory comes amid concerns that cases of H5N1 avian influenza will sicken more people in the United States. CDC officials confirmed earlier this week that a second San Francisco child contracted bird flu last week, and earlier this month, a 65-year-old Louisiana man became the first person to die from the disease in the United States.
Principal Deputy Director for the CDC Nirav Shah said the agency is not changing its guidance out of growing concern about the H5N1 bird flu virus. Instead, officials want to speed up an already slow system that runs the risk of becoming backlogged amid a surge in seasonal flu cases.
More than 100,000 people have been hospitalized with the flu since October, according to CDC data. Officials said they expect more than 200,000 flu hospitalizations by the end of the winter.
There have been 67 confirmed bird flu cases across 10 states since March, with 40 of those cases linked to exposure from infected dairy cows. About two dozen of those cases have been linked to infected poultry and one to a backyard flock of birds.
CDC officials said there is still a low risk of contracting H5N1 bird flu and a moderate pandemic risk stemming from the current age of the virus.
There are different types of influenza, and H5N1 avian influenza is caused by a kind of influenza A virus, which is a category of flu that also includes most seasonal variants of the virus.
Currently, hospitals will occasionally test for influenza in patients who appear to have the virus. Most influenza tests performed in hospitals or other health clinics can show if someone has a seasonal variant of the flu, but they cannot detect bird flu.
Many hospitals will test for the H5N1 bird flu variant by sending bulk batches of influenza A samples to public health laboratories every few days, according to Shah.
“But this system can take time, and sometimes by the time the results of the subtyping are in, the patient may already be discharged,” said Shah.
Hospitals that have the equipment to test for the H5N1 bird flu subtypes are urged to do so in house, as close to the time of admission as possible, particularly for patients with influenza in intensive care units.
CDC officials said they are working with hospitals that cannot test for influenza subtypes to connect them with public laboratories that can test influenza samples in real time.
The new guidance is one of a few new efforts from the Biden administration to prepare for an H5N1 bird flu pandemic before President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month.
Other efforts include the Department of Agriculture launching a national program to test for bird flu in untreated milk and $211 million in new funding to address emerging infectious diseases.
