Australian fowl tested for bird flu
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Australian fowl tested for bird flu
*
By Rosemary Desmond
January 17, 2007 02:31pm
Article from: Agence France-Presse
RESEARCHERS will begin a program next month to investigate whether bird
flu has reached Australian shores.
The highly contagious H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed 150 people
overseas and prompted the slaughter of millions of birds.
Dr Graham Burgess of James Cook University's School of Veterinary and
Biomedical Science will lead a team to collect blood samples in north
Queensland from around 2000 waterfowl, the usual hosts of the disease.
Migratory and resident populations of magpie geese, black ducks and two
whistling ducks will be targeted for the testing.
"The black duck is most interesting to us in that there is a possibility
that the black duck may be capable of being infected with some fairly
virulent strains of influenza," Dr Burgess said.
"There's a lot of different strains of influenza and all influenza
viruses essentially come from birds originally, even all of the human
influenzas."
There was no evidence yet of human to human transmission of bird flu.
Australian scientists believed bird flu had not yet spread to its
nearest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, but it has been found in nearby
Indonesia.
"How far it's come down the Indonesian archipelago is still a little bit
unsure," Dr Burgess said.
Birds infected with H5N1 had suffered fairly high mortality rates.
"The thing we are hoping for is that these birds die before they get to
places like Australia," Dr Burgess said.
"We are expecting not to find H5N1 but if we do find that, we have an
obligation immediately to hand it over to the CSIRO lab in Geelong
(Victoria).
There is a plan in place of how exactly it would be handled from then on."
The prevalence of influenza in ducks in some parts of the world was up
to 50 per cent, Dr Burgess said.
"We expect to find between one and 10 per cent of north Queensland's
waterfowl population to be carrying influenza viruses."
The three-year study will examine if the levels of influenza in
waterfowl were increasing or if the patterns of infection were changing,
Dr Burgess said.