https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/22/india-bird-flu-first-human-death

An eleven-year-old boy’s death highlights a new risk for the world’s second-most populous nation battling the coronavirus pandemic.

22 Jul 2021

India is investigating its first documented human death from bird flu after an 11-year-old boy succumbed to the disease earlier this month, says the health ministry.

The boy was admitted to New Delhi’s premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences on July 2. He died on Tuesday after a multiorgan failure, a government statement said late on Wednesday.KEEP READINGIndia farmers to protest near parliament to demand repeal of lawsSmog tower to help India’s capital breathe, but experts scepticalIndia’s PM Modi accused of ‘treason’ over Pegasus spyware scandalFahadh Faasil: Crusader of a New Wave in India’s Malayalam cinema

Health workers treating the patient and the boy’s family have been kept in isolation, and authorities have launched contact tracing, the statement said.

In Haryana, the boy’s home state in India’s north, the Animal Husbandry Department has not found any suspected case of bird flu but has stepped up surveillance, it said.

Genome sequencing and virus isolation is in process and an epidemiological investigation has been initiated, the health ministry said.

The boy lived in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of capital New Delhi, and was also suffering from leukaemia and pneumonia, a report by the AFP news agency said on Thursday.

The death from the bird flu virus of the H5N1 strain highlights a potential new risk for the world’s second-most populous nation battling the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 31 million people and killed over 400,000.https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.472.0_en.html#goog_1293241178Play Video

India has seen more than half a dozen bird flu outbreaks in poultry in the past 20 years, all of which were brought under control, with no human cases reported in the country previously.

Avian influenza occurs mainly in birds and poultry. In 2008, millions of poultry were culled in India.

But cases of transmission between humans are extremely rare.ADVERTISING

H5N1 first broke out in 1997, then spread between 2003 and 2011, while H7N9 was first detected in 2013.

Two strains of bird flu, H5N1 and H7N9, first found in 2013, led to human contamination in Asia through infected birds.

H7N9 has infected 1,668 people and killed 616 since 2013, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

In the Indian case, the ministry said, the virus belonged to the H5Nx subtype, considered worrying as they have proven to evolve into highly dangerous strains.

Last month, China revealed its first human case of bird flu and in February, Russia detected the disease among workers at a poultry factory.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/africa/chimpanzee-gorilla-attacks-scn-scli-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0JdOkd8n-7m6GSljZBDwTOv3vehGxGeC4BqItwSaCOP-70ZJH5b1RtfXE

By Rob Picheta, CNN

Updated 8:32 AM ET, Thu July 22, 2021Chimps and gorillas in Loango National Park were watched as part of the study.

(CNN)Chimpanzees‘ lethal attacks on gorillas in the wild have been observed for the first time, a team of researchers has said.Experts observing dozens of chimps at Loango National Park in Gabon had expected them to be relaxed around gorillas.But while the two species were usually playful, the researchers were surprised to witness occasional vicious attacks.

“At first, we only noticed screams of chimpanzees and thought we were observing a typical encounter between individuals of neighboring chimpanzee communities,” said Lara M. Southern, the study’s lead author, in a press release.

“But then, we heard chest beats, a display characteristic for gorillas, and realized that the chimpanzees had encountered a group of five gorillas,” she added, referencing the first attack the team saw, in 2019.

The group, from Osnabrück University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, published the findings on Monday in the journal Nature.The two encounters they recorded, which lasted 52 and 79 minutes, saw the chimpanzees form coalitions and launch attacks on the gorillas.

Two encounters were seen by researchers, both lasting around an hour.The silverback and adult females gorillas defended themselves and their offspring. Both silverbacks and several adult females escaped, but two gorilla infants were separated from their mothers and killed, the authors wrote.”Our observations provide the first evidence that the presence of chimpanzees can have a lethal impact on gorillas. We now want to investigate the factors triggering these surprisingly aggressive interactions,” said Tobias Deschner, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.The attacks were particularly surprising given the way the two groups of animals had behaved beforehand. “Interactions between chimpanzees and gorillas have so far been considered as relatively relaxed,” said Simone Pika, a cognitive biologist at Osnabrück University.

Mysterious chimpanzee behavior may be evidence of ‘sacred’ rituals“We have regularly observed both species interacting peacefully in foraging trees. Our colleagues from Congo even witnessed playful interactions between the two great ape species,” Pika said.Around 45 chimps were being observed for the study, which intended to analyze their relationships, use of tools, communication and hunting skills, among other characteristics.The authors suggested that pooling food with other species could have caused the flare-ups. “It could be that sharing of food resources by chimpanzees, gorillas and forest elephants in the Loango National Park result in increased competition and sometimes even in lethal interactions between the two great ape species,” Deschner said.Loango National Park is a sprawling protected area on Gabon’s coast in western sub-Saharan Africa. It is home to elephants, buffalo and a number of other species.

The region is home to the western lowland gorilla, which is a critically endangered species.Chimpanzees are an endangered species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.