Nearly half of the people the World Health Organization has confirmed with H5N1 bird flu have died. The tally, covering early 2003 through January 2026, stands at 993 cases and 477 deaths, across 25 countries. That is a case fatality rate of 48%.
The number needs handling with care. WHO counts only laboratory-confirmed infections, so anyone who caught the virus mildly and never got tested sits outside the ratio. Its table also includes some detections in people with no symptoms. Whether the true death rate among everyone infected is higher or lower, the data cannot say.
Where the cases are
The toll falls hardest in places where people live close to poultry. Egypt has recorded 359 cases and 120 deaths. Indonesia has 200 cases and 168 deaths, the worst fatality ratio among the big clusters. Viet Nam has 130 cases and 65 deaths, Cambodia 90 and 52, China 57 and 32. Most of Indonesia’s cases date to the first years, when 162 people fell ill between 2003 and 2009 and 134 of them died.
The United States sits at the other end. It has 71 cases and a single death, nearly all of them reported in 2024 and early 2025.
The recent pace is slower. WHO logged 102 cases and 10 deaths from 2020 through 2024, then 30 cases and 12 deaths in 2025. No cases for 2026 had been entered when the January table was compiled on 22 January 2026.
The Americas
The Pan American Health Organization, in an update dated 11 March 2026, counted 75 human H5N1 infections in five countries of the region since April 2022, two of them fatal. The United States accounts for 71. One came in 2022; the other 70 arrived from March 2024 through February 2025. Mexico reported one case on 2 April 2025. Canada, Chile and Ecuador had one each.
Related strains made their own news. A human H5N2 case was confirmed in Mexico on 2 October 2025. Six weeks later, on 14 November, American officials announced the first H5N5 infection in a person anywhere in the world, and that patient died. Investigators pointed to exposure to backyard flocks and other domestic birds, and no further cases linked to it turned up.
Animals set the pace
People catch the virus mainly from infected animals or contaminated surroundings. Since 2007, no sustained spread between humans has been identified. But the animal side keeps widening. Reports by December 2025 listed over 600 species of wild and farmed birds hit by avian influenza viruses able to jump to people. Another 68 species of mammals, wild and domestic, were on the list too. PAHO warns that steady detections in wild mammals raise the risk that the virus adapts to them.
Sources
- Cumulative number of confirmed human cases for avian influenza A(H5N1) reported to WHO, 2003-2026
- Epidemiological Update: Avian Influenza A(H5N1) in the Americas Region (PAHO/WHO)
