Where Avian Flu Pandemic Looms, A Global Effort Is Underway

The culprit: avian flu, a budding pandemic in Asia. The agent: farms and markets across the continent, the junctions where humans, livestock, and wildlife cross paths. The investigators: New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society Field Veterinary Program (FVP) staff, working together with Mongolian health agencies, in an unprecedented international effort to contain the disease.

Reports of the most recent avian influenza outbreak came from the Mongolian Ministry of Food and Agriculture, after a discovery of dead wild migratory birds at Erkhel Lake in Kovsgol province. The finding coincided with confirmations of cases in Russia and Kazakhstan. WCS wildlife health experts working in western Mongolia immediately traveled to the site, near the border with Russia, to study these latest victims, and a joint WCS-Mongolia team of scientists, veterinarians, and public health officials collected samples from both dead birds and those at risk of contracting the virus. The team, supported by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), sent the samples to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which confirmed that the birds were infected with the pathogenic form of avian flu, H5N1—the same strain that has killed over 50 people in Southeast Asia and more than 5,000 wild birds in western China.

The collaborative, multidisciplinary response to this latest outbreak reflects the WCS One World-One Health approach to making informed decisions on global health crises that intersect human, wildlife, and livestock populations. WCS experts are warning that to contain this potential epidemic, prevention activities must include better management practices in farms, especially those that are small and open-air, where domestic poultry and waterfowl are allowed to intermingle with wild birds. Officials would also need to monitor wildlife markets, where wild and domesticated species are kept in close proximity, and risk exposure to a wide range of pathogens.

The latest discovery of the virus indicates a new threat. Infected wild migratory birds have the capacity to carry the highly pathogenic avian influenza across long distances, introducing it to areas even where there is a paucity of domestic poultry, as in Mongolia. Yet WCS scientists remain hopeful that proactive prevention efforts in farms and markets can curb this potential epidemic: While approximately 100 dead birds were found at Erkhel Lake, 6,500 apparently healthy birds of 55 species were also observed. The samples collected from live whooper swans living at the same site as one dead, infected swan tested negative for the virus, as did samples from other live birds, including ruddy shelducks, bar-headed geese, and black-headed gulls. Researchers are therefore drawing preliminary conclusions that the waterfowl species typically identified in recent outbreaks appear to be victims rather than effective carriers of the disease.

Wildlife and health experts, including the FAO, maintain that indiscriminate culling of wild migratory bird populations would be ineffective in preventing the spread of avian flu. “Focusing our limited resources on the hubs where humans, livestock, and wildlife come into close contact,” says Dr. Billy Karesh, Director of the FVP, who led the WCS team in Mongolia, is “the best hope for successfully containing the spread of avian flu.”

To learn more about avian influenza, and why culling wild birds is not a solution to containing the virus’s spread, click here

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