The U.S. government will pay the vaccine maker Moderna $176 million to develop a pandemic vaccine that could be used to treat bird flu in people as cases in dairy cows continue to mount across the country, federal officials announced Tuesday.

A new strain of bird flu never seen before in humans has killed a man in Mexico.

The patient had been hospitalised in Mexico City with a strain of bird flu known as H5N2, the WHO said in a statement. The strain has largely gone under the radar, with the outbreak raising questions about how much damage it could cause.

In early April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notified the public that an individual in Texas had tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or bird flu. This person experienced conjunctivitis — or redness of the eyes — as their only symptom after being exposed to dairy cattle that were presumed to be infected with HPAI. This was the second documented human case of avian influenza in the United States since 2022, and has escalated concerns for a large outbreak — or potentially a pandemic — in the human population.

Colombia has restricted the import of beef and beef products coming from U.S. states where dairy cows have tested positive for avian influenza as of April 15, according the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The largest producer of fresh eggs in the U.S. said Tuesday it had temporarily halted production at a Texas plant after bird flu was found in chickens, and officials said the virus had also been detected at a poultry facility in Michigan.

The story of how the H5N1 viruses came to be created – and the response to a 2019 safety breach – raises uncomfortable questions about the tremendous trust the world is placing in research labs.

A 56-year-old woman in China has died after contracting H3N8 bird flu, the first known fatality in a human from this strain of avian influenza. 

A woman in southern China has tested positive for H3N8 bird flu, local officials say, making it only the third time that the virus has been found in humans, although a previous strain may have caused the 1889 pandemic.

The father of an 11-year-old Cambodian girl who died of H5N1 bird flu has tested positive for the virus, the health ministry announced on Friday, less than two days after the first case was confirmed.

Bird flu could mutate to become even more harmful to humans due to the ongoing unprecedented outbreak, experts fear.

Federal scientists are gearing up to test the first vaccines in poultry against bird flu in years, as Biden administration officials say they have now begun weighing an unprecedented shift in the U.S. strategy to counter the growing outbreak.

A farmer-advocacy organization says record-breaking increases in the price of eggs isn’t being caused by inflation or avian flu, as claimed by egg companies, but by price collusion among the nation’s top egg producers.

Around 48m birds have been culled across the UK and the EU in the last year as a result of the largest outbreak of avian flu on record.

A bird flu virus that’s sweeping across the U.S. is rapidly becoming the country’s worst outbreak, having already killed over 37 million chickens and turkeys and with more deaths expected through next month as farmers perform mass culls across the Midwest.

The first identified human case in the United States of the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu and typically transmitted among poultry and wild birds, has been found in a Colorado man who works on a Western Slope poultry farm.

The Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) announced on Tuesday that it has confirmed a case of the highly contagious bird flu in a commercial flock of 570,000 broiler chickens and that the birds will be "humanely depopulated and disposed of."