NewsTracker Answers for week of Feb. 27, 2023

Q: An 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died last week from the country's first known human case of bird flu in nine years, health authorities have confirmed. Where is Cambodia on the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia?

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Q: The girl fell ill with a high fever, cough and sore throat before being taken to Cambodia’s capital where she was diagnosed with an infection of the H5N1 avian flu strain. What is the capital and largest city of Cambodia?

A. Bangkok

B. Hanoi

C. Phnom Penh

D. Vientiane

C. Phnom Penh is Cambodia’s capital and largest city. Bangkok is the capital of Cambodia’s northwest neighbor Thailand; Vientiane is the capital of its northern neighbor Laos; and Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam to the east.

Q: Authorities are checking if the girl and her father caught H5N1 from diseased birds, which is the way humans usually become infected. The disease was first identified in 1996 in geese of which nation that is the world’s fourth-largest by land area?

A. Brazil

B. China

C. India

D. United States

B. The world’s largest nation is Russia, followed by Canada, the United States, China, Brazil, Australia and India. A year after the H5N1 strain found in China’s geese, it was found in people in Hong Kong. There have been many outbreaks since, but the current outbreak is unusually widespread in Europe and the United States.

Q: Wild birds have spread the virus to domestic flocks like chickens, leading to a big rise in egg prices. Health officials are worried that the virus could mutate to be spread through human-to-human contact. It was recently found spreading among mink on a farm on what nation on Europe’s Iberian Peninsula?

A. Denmark

B. Greece

C. Norway

D. Spain

D. Samples of the virus isolated from the mink in Spain carried a genetic mutation that is known to help flu replicate better in mammals. Spain is on Europe’s Iberian Peninsula; Denmark is on the Jutland Peninsula; Greece is on the Balkan Peninsula; and Norway is on the Scandinavian Peninsula.

Q: The girl who died last week was Cambodia’s first bird flu death since 2014. The World Health Organization said 870 humans have been infected with avian flu over the past 20 years. How many of those infections were fatal?

A. More than half

B. About a third

C. Nearly a quarter

D. Less than 1 in 10

A. The World Health Organization reported 457 deaths among those infected. The agency is closely monitoring the virus for mutations.