{"id":3530,"date":"2023-05-09T20:47:44","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T01:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3530"},"modified":"2023-05-09T20:47:48","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T01:47:48","slug":"a-frightening-virus-is-killing-a-massive-number-of-wild-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/05\/09\/a-frightening-virus-is-killing-a-massive-number-of-wild-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"A frightening virus is killing a massive number of wild birds"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Vox<\/a> Scientists have never seen anything like it.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the past two years, a viral disease has swept across much of the planet \u2014 not Covid but a type of avian flu. It\u2019s devastated the poultry industry in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, sickening millions of farmed birds, which either die from infection or are killed by farmers seeking to stem the spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poultry outbreak has become an animal welfare crisis. It\u2019s also one reason\u00a0eggs have become so expensive<\/a>; there are simply fewer hens to lay them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the virus is causing another major crisis that\u2019s drawn far less attention: the death of wild birds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ongoing outbreak of avian flu has killed hundreds of thousands \u2014 if not millions<\/a> \u2014 of wild birds, including endangered species like the California condor. It\u2019s one of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks in history. Having now spread across five continents and hundreds of wildlife species, scientists call the current outbreak a panzootic, meaning a pandemic among animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing right now is uncharted territory,\u201d said Andrew Ramey, a wildlife geneticist at the US Geological Survey, one of the federal agencies involved in testing wild birds for the virus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number of dead birds in itself is historic, but so is the virus\u2019s biology. Typically, avian influenza viruses only cause severe disease and death in domestic birds like chickens and farmed ducks; they sweep through populations, killing upward of 90 percent<\/a> of the flock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This virus, however, is different. It\u2019s hammering wild birds and other wildlife, including mammals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s causing a high amount of mortality in a huge breadth of wild birds, which is not something that has been seen before,\u201d said Wendy Puryear, a molecular virologist at Tufts University who studies viral evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is especially concerning because birds are already at risk across the world. North America alone has lost an astonishing 3 billion breeding birds<\/a> in the last half-century, due to threats like climate change, predation by <\/strong>feral and pet cats<\/a>, and the loss of grasslands and other habitats. This panzootic is only making an ongoing extinction crisis worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The virus could also pose a threat to us. While it doesn\u2019t readily infect and spread among people today, the avian virus could evolve traits that make it more dangerous to humans as it circulates among wild animals. That\u2019s another reason scientists are taking the outbreak among wild birds so seriously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An unusual avian flu<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Viruses that cause avian flu are actually pretty common. They\u2019ve been circulating for eons among wild birds \u2014 and especially waterfowl, such as ducks and geese \u2014 without causing them much harm. These mild forms of infection are called low-pathogenic avian influenza, or LPAI, which means they\u2019re typically not deadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On occasion, a low-pathogenic virus can jump from wild birds to poultry farms. As the virus replicates in densely packed warehouses of farmed birds, it can quickly evolve and pick up adaptations that make it highly deadly to poultry. At that point, it gets dubbed a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, or HPAI virus. Historically, however, most of these HPAI viruses haven\u2019t killed large numbers of wild birds, even if they did spill out of the farm and back into wild populations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came an avian flu outbreak on a goose farm in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vox Scientists have never seen anything like it. In the past two years, a viral disease has swept across much of the planet \u2014 not Covid but a type of avian flu. It\u2019s devastated the poultry industry in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, sickening millions of farmed birds, which either die from infection or are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3531,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions\/3531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}