Washington reports first US bird flu death of 2026; health officials say risk to the public is low

By Brenda Goodman, CNN

(CNN) — A person in Yakima County, Washington, who caught bird flu after being exposed to infected dairy cows has died following a severe illness, county health officials said Sunday.

This is the first known person in the US to die from complications from avian influenza in 2026 and the third in the US to die from bird flu since February 2024, when the virus jumped into dairy cattle for the first time.

On October 31, the Yakima County Health District reported that a person who had come into contact with infected cattle was hospitalized with a severe case of bird flu. The person had underlying health conditions, but the county did not specify what they were. On November 1, the county reported that the person had died. Yakima County health officials said they are closely monitoring the contacts of the person who died to ensure that they didn’t pass the infection to anyone else.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded bird flu cases in more than 70 people in the US since 2024. Most of the people who’ve become ill have worked on farms with infected cattle or poultry. Health officials say that most cases have been mild and all have been so-called dead-end infections, in which a virus jumps from an animal to a person but doesn’t spread farther.

No human-to-human transmission of bird flu has been documented in the US. Health officials say the risk to the public remains low.

Three cases have been identified in people in the Yakima County Health District this year: a mild case identified last month, the person who died and a third case reported over the weekend.

All three Washington cases have occurred since mid-October and resulted from exposure to infected cows. The third case, like the first case, has mild symptoms and has not been hospitalized, county health district officials said.

State health officials said they have reported all three cases to the CDC. So far, the agency has not included them on its bird flu dashboard.

Tracking bird flu cases in humans

Since October 8, 33 dairy herds infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus have been reported in Washington. The state is urging people who work at the dairies to wear personal protective equipment and report their symptoms if they feel ill.

Dr. Dave Atteberry, the public health officer for the Yakima health district, said the dairies with infected cows were found in early October through milk testing by the Washington State Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Agriculture.

Public health workers with the county then reached out to the affected farms and enrolled dairy workers in a text-based health screening tool that checks daily for symptoms including cough, fever or red eyes. If the workers report any, the health department follows up with additional questions, Atteberry told CNN last month.

“We’re throwing a large net so that we capture everybody that that potentially could be getting exposed, and then we’re able to focus our attention on those individuals that are exposed, and then we get them treated,” Atteberry said last month.

On October 15, a dairy worker in the county tested positive for mild H5N1. It was the first human case reported in nearly a year.

Not all states are approaching bird flu the same way. ProPublica recently reported that Utah’s Department of Agriculture and Food agreed to share information about bird flu outbreaks on farms as long as health officials didn’t take steps to track workers’ health.

This patchwork state-by-state approach to monitoring bird flu infections in people is concerning, said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, who directs the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

“I just think that our our picture of H5N1 is the murkiest it’s ever been,” Nuzzo said.

Nuzzo said this bird flu uptick at dairies in Washington, which has coincided with the very early circulation of seasonal influenza on the Pacific Coast, sets the table for the H5N1 virus to swap pieces of its genome with seasonal flu viruses. A big change like that could potentially give the virus the tools it needs to better infect humans.

“That is the bad scenario. So when you have an uptick in bird flu activity corresponding with human flu season, that just increases my worry even more that we could have a mix that we don’t want to have,” she said.

Atteberry said farm workers who test positive are given antiviral medication with the goal of treating their symptoms as well as lowering their viral load to reduce the chance they could pass it to others.

“Even though we haven’t seen that biologically be possible yet,” Atteberry said. “We’re doing it out of an abundance of caution.”

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