New Delhi:Even as the bird flu virus H5N1 is evolving rapidly, with the potential to become a significant threat to human health, a team of Indian researchers using an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based model has decoded how the deadly virus can actually spillover to humans.

In the study, published in the BMC Public Health journal, the team used BharatSim -- an ultra-large-scale agent-based simulation framework for infectious diseases that was originally built for Covid-19 modelling -- to describe the sequential stages of a zoonotic spillover.

“We modelled the possibility of initial spillover events of H5N1 from birds to humans, followed by sustained human-to-human transmission,” said Philip Cherian and Gautam I. Menon from the Department of Physics at the Haryana-based Ashoka University, in the paper.

“Our model describes the two-step nature of outbreak initiation, showing how crucial epidemiological parameters governing transmission can be calibrated given data for the distribution of the number of primary and secondary cases at early times,” they added.

Avian flu, which first emerged in China in the late 1990s, has since occasionally infected humans.As South and South-East Asia have the world's fastest-growing poultry markets, the region is predicted to be the likely location for an initial outbreak.

Source:Ndtv