| Page 2 of 2 < |
Deadly Flu Strain Shows Up in Migratory Birds
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
There is no guarantee H5N1's presence in migratory birds will lead to global dissemination. It simply increases the chance.
For there to be further spread, a significant number of infected birds would need to be healthy enough to start their migration. They would need to establish a "chain of transmission" in the migrating flock, with new birds acquiring the virus as the infected ones died or recovered. At their destinations, they would have to make contact with poultry, igniting a new chicken outbreak and again putting the virus into contact with human beings.
The likelihood of any of these steps is unknown.
"What would migratory birds contribute to the possibilities of disease outbreak? That is the question we don't know the answer to," said David E. Swayne of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga.
How the Qinghai Lake birds acquired H5N1 influenza is unknown.
There are chickens in Qinghai Province, but "there is no H5N1 infection in those chickens -- they don't have it," George F. Gao of the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a telephone interview from Beijing. He is the lead author of the paper that was published online by Science.
Both his team and one from the University of Hong Kong, whose report is published online in Nature, detected in the Qinghai Lake samples the three genetic defects and mutations found in the H5N1 strains responsible for high mortality in chickens and humans.
According to the two reports, the wild-bird strain bears genetic features of the virus found in chickens in China in 2003 and 2005 and in a peregrine falcon in Hong Kong in 2004. It is not identical to any of them, however.
The leader of the Hong Kong team, Yi Guan, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture closed the Qinghai Lake area to his colleagues in mid-May.
"We hope they will open the door and let us in to do long-term surveillance," he said yesterday from Hong Kong. "There are a lot of questions waiting for answers."
