Article from Reuters News on the Avian Flu in Birds

WASHINGTON - Bird experts working in some of the most remote areas of
Alaska have begun checking migrating birds for avian influenza to see if
they are spreading the feared virus out of Asia.


A team heads off later this week for the Alaskan Peninsula to test
Steller's eiders, a type of duck, for the virus, US Geological Survey
experts said. Other teams have already begun testing geese and ducks in
other refuges, taking advantage of regular ecological studies to test birds
migrating from Asia for the H5N1 virus.

"We think that Alaska is likely to be the front line," said Hon Ip, a
virologist at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison,
Wisconsin. Other states are vulnerable, too, he said.

"There are birds that fly directly across the Pacific from Southeast
Asia to our western states like California, Oregon and Washington," Ip added
in a telephone interview.

The H5N1 avian influenza virus, which re-emerged in China in 2003, has
caused the death or destruction of more than 100 million birds across Asia,
from Japan to Russia's Siberia. Migrating birds in China and Mongolia have
been found to be infected with the virus.

So far it has killed more than 50 people, although it does not easily
infect humans. Experts fear it will eventually acquire the ability to spread
easily from person to person and cause a global pandemic of exceptionally
deadly influenza.

No one is sure how it is spreading, but migrating birds are a prime
suspect. Officials fear birds such as ducks and geese could bring the virus
to Western Europe, Africa and the Middle East over coming months.

The USGS wants to help keep an eye out for it in North America.

"We also worry that birds will stop off in some of the US territories
in the Pacific like Guam, and Hawaii," Ip said. He is especially concerned
about endangered species of birds.


PIGGYBACKED RESEARCH

So the USGS and the US Fish and Wildlife Service have piggybacked
avian influenza surveys onto already scheduled visits to examine certain
species, band them and track their movements.

"We have chosen sites and species of birds that we think are the most
likely ones that contact birds over in the Russian Siberian side that have
the potential to migrate and make contact with birds in North America," Ip
said.

Dirk Derksen, a wildlife biologist at USGS in Anchorage, said teams
have already sampled a sea goose species called the Pacific Black Brant in
northern Alaska's national petroleum reserve and Emperor geese in western
Alaska's Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.

Biologists and their helpers, in some cases Eskimo youth from nearby
villages, catch the birds, which are helpless while molting. They put a leg
band on them and while at it flip them over to take a swab from the cloaca
to see if the birds are carrying virus in their feces.

These samples are sent to Ip's lab in Madison for testing.

"There is no evidence at all of any disease in any of the species that
we sampled here," Derksen said in a telephone interview.

Experts say the key to spreading influenza would be healthy birds that
are not sickened by the virus. If the virus kills an animal quickly, it is
less likely to spread it.

Derksen said the teams are also scheduled to check ducks called
Northern pintails on the Cook Inlet in south central Alaska near Anchorage.

"They breed across North America and they breed across Asia and there
is a demonstrated link between pintails that have been marked in California
and a migration across the Bering strait to eastern Russia," Derksen said.

Other species now being sampled include shore birds called bar-tailed
godwits and sharp-tailed sandpipers.


Story by Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE




Martha Jordan
www.swansociety.org