A person in Washington state has been infected with the bird flu for the first time in nine months. Not only is this the first case in a long time, but the person was infected with a strain of avian influenza that has never before been reported in human beings.

The patient has been hospitalized with H5N5 avian influenza since early this month. This patient is described as an older resident of Grays Harbor County who has underlying health issues. It isn’t clear exactly how the health authorities even discovered that the virus was infecting this person. State and local public health and agriculture officials are investigating the case, but they suspect that the person may have been exposed through contact with a backyard poultry flock, accoridng to a report by CNN. 

The virus spreads through an animal’s saliva, mucus, and feces, or through milk from dairy cattle. The general risk of bird flu goes up in the late fall and winter as birds migrate and come into contact with other animals, like backyard flocks.

Back in January, the United States started warning of an H5N9 outbreak after getting through the H5N1 disaster that they blamed for the culling of hundreds of millions of birds. 

ALERT: US Reports H5N9 Bird Flu Outbreak

So far, health authorities claim that there has been no known human-to-human transmission of this virus.

Dr. Richard Webby says that the virus still has “pandemic potential” even though the risk to humans remains low.

“I think it’s clear it’s not an easy leap for this virus to make, to switch from being a duck virus to being a human virus. I think that’s pretty clear, but I certainly wouldn’t put money on the fact that it can’t make that leap,” said Webby, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds. “It’s going to take a little bit of the biological stars aligning for that to happen. We could argue exactly how likely that is, but no one actually knows. Only time will tell us, unfortunately.”

Seventy other human cases of bird flu have been reported in the U.S. as part of the ongoing outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One person died in January who was also elderly and had underlying conditions.