What’s happening: The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) released a Health Advisory on June 11 recommending that, as the 2024-25 flu season ends, health care providers continue testing for influenza throughout the summer — particularly in patients with respiratory illness, conjunctivitis, or avian influenza A (H5N1) exposure risk factors.
What else to know: The advisory also recommends reporting symptomatic patients with H5N1 exposure risk factors to the patient’s local health department.
Other recommendations direct hospitals to:
- Arrange for subtyping at a public health laboratory for any samples from patients who are positive for influenza A and have exposure risk factors for H5N1 infection, unless subtyping has already occurred and results show a seasonal subtype (i.e., H1 or H3)
- Continue testing hospitalized patients with severe respiratory illness for influenza, regardless of whether they have exposure risk factors for H5N1 infection
- Ensure that influenza A positive samples from such patients are subtyped either in the clinical laboratory or sent to a commercial or public health laboratory for subtyping
For more patient communication resources, please refer to CDPH’s Respiratory Virus Prevention and Bird Flu toolkits.
