NEW YORK (AP) — A Washington state resident has bird flu, and it's a different type than what was seen in previous infections, state health officials said Friday.
It is the nation’s first human case of bird flu since February. The older adult with underlying health conditions remains hospitalized.
State health officials had announced the preliminary bird flu diagnosis on Thursday. On Friday, they said it had been confirmed.
The person was infected with a bird flu called H5N5, state officials said. State and federal health officials said it appears to be the first known human infection with the H5N5 bird flu virus.
That version is not believed to be a greater threat to human health than the H5N1 virus behind a wave of 70 reported human infections in the U.S. in 2024 and 2025. Most of those have been mild illnesses in workers on dairy and poultry farms.
“These viruses behave similarly,” said Richard Webby, a prominent flu researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “My gut instinct is to consider it the same as H5N1 from a human health perspective.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday issued a similar statement that said no information would suggest "the risk to public health has increased as a result of this case.”
The agency is awaiting a specimen from Washington to conduct additional testing.
The distinction between H5N5 and H5N1 lies in a protein involved in releasing the virus from an infected cell and promoting spread to surrounding cells.
“Think along the lines of different brands of car tires. They both do the same job, it’s just each is better tuned for specific conditions, which we don’t fully understand,” Webby wrote in an email.
H5N5 may have a different preference for which kind of birds it most readily infects, he added.
The Grays Harbor County resident, who has not been identified, has a backyard flock of domestic poultry that had been exposed to wild birds, health officials said. They believe the domestic poultry or wild birds are the most likely source of exposure, but say they are still investigating.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - A sign with the CDC logo is displayed at the entrance to the agency's headquarters in Atlanta on March 2, 2025. (Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 1, 2026--
Senzing, developers of industry-leading entity resolution technology, today announced that Stephen Gilderdale has joined the company as President & Chief Commercial Officer. In this role, Gilderdale will lead the company’s global commercial organization, with responsibility for sales, partnerships, marketing, and revenue operations.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260401899657/en/
Gilderdale brings deep experience building and scaling customer-facing teams across enterprise technology. Before joining Senzing®, he served as Executive Vice President of Global Customer Solutions and Services at Collibra, where he led a global organization focused on helping enterprises build greater confidence in their data and turn that confidence into business results. Earlier in his career, he held senior go-to-market leadership roles at Dell Technologies and also gained formative experience in financial markets.
At Senzing, Gilderdale will work closely with customers and partners to help organizations across banking, insurance, and AI agentic deployments unlock greater value from identity intelligence and trusted data. This work is increasingly important as enterprises look to strengthen AI, analytics, and real-time decisioning with more accurate, connected, and explainable entity data.
“Stephen is a proven growth leader who knows how to align teams, sharpen execution, and keep the customer at the center of the business,” said Jeff Jonas, Founder and CEO of Senzing. “He brings the commercial discipline, global operating experience, and leadership maturity that will help Senzing scale its next phase of growth as enterprises rise to meet both the opportunities and risks of agentic AI.”
“I am excited to join Senzing at such an important stage of growth, as demand for identity intelligence continues to rise across AI and agentic markets,” said Gilderdale. “Organizations everywhere are under pressure to turn complex data into trusted insight they can act on. Senzing brings a unique ability to help customers do exactly that. I look forward to working with the team, customers, and partners to build on that momentum.”
About Senzing
Senzing delivers the identity intelligence organizations need to achieve their agentic AI aspirations. As the creator of Agentic Entity Resolution, Senzing enables AI agents to autonomously identify and act on real-world entities in real time or batch—keeping all data secure within customer infrastructure. Backed by 40+ years of innovation and 300+ years of combined team experience, Senzing is trusted by organizations worldwide to ensure their AI agents operate on accurate and trustworthy data. Senzing is headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada. For more information, visit www.senzing.ai.
Stephen Gilderdale
