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.