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 The man, a resident of the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalised on
April 28 after developing a fever and other symptoms, the NHC said
in a statement.
He was diagnosed as having the H10N3 avian influenza virus on May
28, it said, but did not give details on how the man had been
infected with the virus.
The man was stable and ready to be discharged from hospital. Medical
observation of his close contacts had not found any other cases.
H10N3 is a low pathogenic, or relatively less severe, strain of the
virus in poultry and the risk of it spreading on a large scale was
very low, the NHC added.
The strain is "not a very common virus," said Filip Claes, regional
laboratory coordinator of the Food and Agriculture Organization's
Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases at the Regional
Office for Asia and the Pacific.
Only around 160 isolates of the virus were reported in the 40 years
to 2018, mostly in wild birds or waterfowl in Asia and some limited
parts of North America, and none had been detected in chickens so
far, he added.
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 Analysing the genetic data of
the virus will be necessary to determine whether
it resembles older viruses or if it is a novel
mix of different viruses, Claes said.
Many different strains of avian influenza are
present in China and some sporadically infect
people, usually those working with poultry.
There have been no significant numbers of human
infections with bird flu since the H7N9 strain
killed around 300 people during 2016-2017.
No other cases of human infection with H10N3
have previously been reported globally, the NHC
said.
(Reporting by Hallie Gu and Dominique Patton;
Editing by Richard Pull in and Barbara Lewis)
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