From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Why Dead Birds Are Falling From the Sky   
   By David Quammen, April 23, 2023, NY Times   
      
   Experts are concerned that a new global disease outbreak, possibly worse than   
   Covid-19, might begin any day. The virus that worries them is H5N1, a form of   
   avian influenza, or bird flu. Some researchers have warned that with just a   
   few mutations, or    
   maybe a sudden swapping of gene segments, this deadly flu virus could gain the   
   ability to spread from human to human.   
      
   But in fact, the next pandemic has already begun. To use a more accurate term,   
   a panzootic — a widespread outbreak of disease among nonhuman animals — is   
   underway.   
      
   To appreciate this catastrophe, we’ve got to move the focus off humans, at   
   least for a bit. H5N1 is devastating the world’s birds. Eagles are dropping   
   dead, as are great horned owls and peregrine falcons and pelicans. Twenty   
   California condors    
   recently died of what’s suspected to be avian flu — 10 are confirmed so   
   far. It’s the worst thing that has happened to wild birds since the   
   pesticide DDT.   
      
   Tallying deaths among wildlife in wild places, especially those flying through   
   forests and over oceans, is hard.   Seabirds that nest in great colonies are a   
   little more visible. Such dense nesting also makes them more vulnerable to   
   contagious disease,    
   and many kinds are long-lived, maturing at relatively late ages, which leaves   
   their populations slower to rebound. During nesting season last May, at a   
   colony of sandwich terns on the coast of France, observers counted more than   
   1,000 tern corpses.    
   France as a whole may have lost 10 percent of its breeding population within a   
   week. At remote island sites in Britain, such as Orkney and the Shetlands, the   
   great skua seems to have suffered die-offs of up to 85 percent.   
      
   Any such bird flu, so deadly, is called highly pathogenic avian influenza, or   
   H.P.A.I. That label was once applied to viruses that infect chickens. Until   
   this century, these kinds of viruses were virtually unknown among wild birds.   
   The exception was an    
   event in 1961, when 1,300 common terns showed up dead along the coast of South   
   Africa. The cause was a new avian virus of the general sort that — we now   
   know — wild aquatic birds carry endemically and sometimes spill into   
   domestic birds, pigs and    
   humans. For decades after that tern die-off, though, no other influenza so   
   virulent was detected in wild birds. New influenzas did come from wild birds,   
   yes, but in milder form, usually sickening domestic birds little or not at   
   all. Evolving to become    
   more lethal was something that happened, so far as science could see, mainly   
   among farmed poultry.   
      
   A Belgian epidemiologist, Marius Gilbert, led a 2018 study of this phenomenon.   
   Dr. Gilbert and his colleagues reviewed 39 cases in which a mild avian   
   influenza had evolved into a killer virus. All but two of those 39 known   
   conversions occurred among    
   commercial poultry.   
      
   Is it going too far, I recently asked Dr. Gilbert, to conclude that commercial   
   poultry farms are what deliver the problem of virulent influenzas upon us   
   humans, and also upon wild birds? “No. I don’t think it’s too far,” he   
   said. “But we have    
   to bring nuance to that statement.”   
      
   “Commercial poultry” can mean there’s a vast and dense aggregation of   
   birds — thousands, or hundreds of thousands, in industrial-scale operations   
   — or it can mean 10 chickens and six ducks in the backyard of a family in a   
   rural village. The    
   ducks share the rice paddy with wild birds passing through, and some of the   
   chickens are sent live to a local market. Viruses flow in every direction,   
   including to the children who tend the ducks.   
      
   The currently circulating H5N1 lineage of avian flu emerged back in 1996,   
   among farmed geese in a rural area of Guangdong province in southern China.   
   Its kill rate among those geese was 40 percent, with symptoms that included   
   bleeding and neurological    
   dysfunction. At some point it passed into wild birds, spreading across Asia to   
   Europe and the Mideast, and occasionally into humans and other mammals, though   
   without triggering long chains of transmission.   
      
   In December 2021, it was detected among wild birds in Newfoundland and   
   Labrador, and from there it seems to have been carried by migrating waterfowl   
   down the Atlantic Flyway to the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. That’s where   
   Nicole Nemeth, a wildlife    
   pathologist at the University of Georgia, encountered it, when bald eagles   
   started arriving dead at her laboratory.   
      
   Dr. Nemeth and her colleagues found a high rate of bald eagle nest failure (no   
   surviving chicks) and adult deaths, with dead birds brought to the lab and   
   confirmed to be ravaged by the H.P.A.I. virus. “It was very sad and   
   alarming,” Dr. Nemeth told    
   me.   
      
   Adult birds were losing muscle control, shaking their heads, showing signs of   
   weakness or paralysis, keeling over, tumbling from their high nests. Bald   
   eagles are big birds, weighing up to 14 pounds, so when they fall, they land   
   hard. “As a pathologist,   
    I was looking at these birds carefully, and they were clearly dying of a very   
   severe, acute, viral infection,” Dr. Nemeth said. Some were probably dead by   
   the time they hit the ground.   
      
   Necropsies revealed organ failure and brain inflammation, but also blunt   
   trauma and bleeding from the long falls. And when the adults became sick and   
   fell, the unfledged young usually died, too, either from the same infection or   
   from orphanhood. In    
   coastal Georgia, during the 2022 season, nesting success for bald eagles was   
   down by 30 percent.   
      
   It could get worse. There’s very little, Dr. Nemeth told me, that either   
   science or wildlife management can do. When the bald eagle population declined   
   badly in the 1950s and then the species was declared endangered in 1967, the   
   main cause of    
   reproductive failure — DDT — was banned. The eagle population bounced   
   back, a wondrous conservation success. But you can’t ban a virus like you   
   can a chemical — not a virus that travels everywhere in wild birds and   
   evolves continuously in    
   domestic ones, which are raised in vast numbers on both industrial-scale farms   
   and in backyards.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)