Current avian flu strain deadlier, may become endemic: Study

The current strain of avian influenza, also known as bird flu, is more dangerous than the previous strains, with researchers flagging the need to urgently address the perilous situation. The new study which is led by the University of Maryland team of researchers found out that the current strain is killing millions of birds in unprecedented numbers.

“We’ve been dealing with low pathogenic avian influenza for decades in the poultry industry, but this is different," said Jennifer Mullinax, co-author of the study and an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Environmental Science and Technology.

“This high pathogenic virus is wiping out everything in numbers that we’ve never seen before,” added Mullinax.

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In order to determine how the previous strains differ from the current ones, the study traced the arrival and development of the deadly avian flu pandemic in North America.

It included five data sources from US and Canada poultry and global data sources from 2014 to 2023.

The research analysis, published in the journal Conservation Biology, revealed that the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, which was seen in 2021, is highly pathogenic, unlike the 2015 outbreak of H5N8.

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Johanna Harvey, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland said, “Unlike H5N8, this disease is heavily impacting wild birds."

“It’s difficult to estimate how many birds are truly affected across wild populations, but we’re seeing dramatic disease impacts in raptors, sea birds and colonial nesting birds. And we now have the highest amount of poultry loss to avian influenza, so this is a worst-case scenario.”

Researchers discovered that 7 million birds in Canada and 58 million domestic poultry in the US had either contracted the flu or had been put to death to prevent its spread. It's possible that the most recent avian flu outbreak has changed from a more seasonal sickness to a year-round illness, the study suggested.

As per reports, the avian flu epidemic in 2015 typically occurred in the autumn, giving farmers more time to plan and recoup from losses. But the current epidemic with wild bird cases is peaking in the summer and domestic poultry cases rising in the spring and autumn.

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In its conclusion, the teams of researchers concluded it is likely that the avian flu will go endemic, which might have an impact on food security and the economy. The report recommended collaboration between national and local authorities to control the disease's spread.

“This paper illustrates how unprecedented it is, and describes what we think is coming. It’s really a call to arms saying: we can’t afford to address this in our individual silos,” said Mullinax.

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CPC) earlier said, “Since 2022, despite the wide geographic spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) viruses in wild birds and to poultry worldwide, with sporadic spillover to mammals, only a small number of sporadic human cases of A(H5N1) have been identified."

“All reported human cases since 2022 were associated with recent poultry exposures, and no cases of human-to-human transmission have been identified.”

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