DAILY TRIFECTA: Bird Flu Into Baby Goats

Evolution is winning

TITLE:  Baby goats in Minnesota infected with bird flu, concerning officials
https://www.startribune.com/goat-bird-flu-minnesota-first-ruminant-avian-influenza-mammals-usda-poultry-biosecurity/600352745/

EXCERPTS: Bird flu has reached goats for the first time, a development officials call significant in the nationwide outbreak that began two years ago.

Several baby goats in western Minnesota died earlier this month after being infected with the same strain of avian influenza that has killed millions of birds across the country since 2022, the Minnesota Board of Animal Health announced this week.

While bird flu has found its way to mammals like dogs and skunks before, this is the first time in the United States the virus has been found in a ruminant — a group of animals that includes cattle, sheep and goats.

"It highlights the possibility of the virus infecting other animals on farms with multiple species," state veterinarian Dr. Brian Hoefs said in a statement. "Thankfully, research to date has shown mammals appear to be dead-end hosts, which means they're unlikely to spread [the virus] further."

A backyard flock of 23 chickens and ducks in Stevens County was depopulated in February after the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was found in the birds. Not long after, the owner reached out to state officials about "unusual deaths of newly kidded goats," which shared the same space and water source as the poultry flock, according to the animal health board.

Five of the 10 goat kids that died, which were all younger than two weeks old, tested positive for bird flu, according to a report filed at the World Organisation for Animal Health.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working with the state Board of Animal Health to investigate the transmission.

"The risk to the public is extremely low, and any risk of infection is limited to people in direct contact with infected animals," the board said. "To date, no people in the United States have become ill following contact with mammals infected with this virus."

The larger risk comes from increased animal-to-animal transmission, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"The evolution of the virus makes it much more likely to infect other species," he said. "It's not surprising that we're going to see other mammals living close to other species get infected."

TITLE: Evolution of deadly bird flu strain stems from gene exchanges
https://www.poultryworld.net/health-nutrition/health/evolution-of-deadly-bird-flu-strain-stems-from-gene-exchanges/

EXCERPT: [S]cientists found that the 2020 outbreak of the H5N8 genotype instead of the G0 genotype produced reassortment opportunities and led to the emergence of a new H5N1 virus with G1’s HA and MP genes, causing a significant outbreak in Europe and North America. And through the wild bird migration flyways investigation, the Chinese researchers found that the temporal-spatial coincidence between the H5N8 G1 virus and the bird autumn migration may have expanded the H5 viral spread, which may be one of the main drivers of the emergence of the 2020-22 H5 panzootic.

In the paper ‘Spatiotemporal genotype replacement of H5N8 avian influenza viruses contributed to H5N1 emergence in 2021/2022 panzootic’, published in the journal Journal of Virology, the authors say that since 2020, highly pathogenic avian influenza H5 subtype variants of clade 2.3.4.4b have spread across continents, but until now the factors promoting the genesis and spread of the H5 HPAI viruses have been unclear.

But in this research, the scientists found that the spatiotemporal genotype replacement of H5N8 HPAI viruses contributed to the emergence of the H5N1 variant that caused the 2021/23 panzootic. They found that the viral evolution in poultry of Egypt and surrounding area and autumn bird migration from the Russia-Kazakhstan region to Europe are important drivers. These findings, they say, provide important targets for early warning and could help control the current and future HPAI epidemics.

The publication Nature Asia reported that a team of international researchers revealed that the virus mutated to spread 3 times faster among wild birds than it did in farmed poultry in 2020 and has caused a significant rise in incidental infections in wild carnivores, mink and marine animals.

TITLE: Bird flu is decimating seal colonies. Scientists don’t know how to stop it
https://apnews.com/article/seals-bird-flu-deaths-oceans-80184a8793fbcc21fab01b1c90b0d71b

EXCERPT: Seals and sea lions, in places as far apart as Maine and Chile, appear to be especially vulnerable to the disease, scientists said. The virus has been detected in seals on the east and west coasts of the U.S., leading to deaths of more than 300 seals in New England and a handful more in Puget Sound in Washington. The situation is even more dire in South America, where more than 20,000 sea lions have died in Chile and Peru and thousands of elephant seals have died in Argentina.

The virus can be controlled in domesticated animals, but it can spread unchecked in wildlife and marine mammals such as South America’s seals that lacked prior exposure to it have suffered devastating consequences, said Marcela Uhart, director of the Latin America program at the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis.

 “Once the virus is in wildlife, it spreads like wildfire, as long as there are susceptible animals and species,” Uhart said. “Movement of animals spreads the virus to new areas.”

Scientists are still researching how the seals have contracted bird flu, but it is most likely from contact with infected seabirds, Uhart said. High mortality has affected South American marine mammals consistently since the virus arrived late in 2022, and birds in Peru and Chile have died by the hundreds of thousands from the virus since then, she noted.

The virus is still spreading and was detected in mainland Antarctica for the first time in February.

The deaths of seals and sea lions disrupts ecosystems where the marine mammals serve as key predators near the top of the food chain. Seals help keep the ocean in balance by preventing overpopulation of the fish species they feed on.

Many species affected, such as South American sea lions and Southern elephant seals, have relatively stable populations, but scientists worry about the possibility of the virus jumping to more jeopardized animals. Scientists have said bird flu might have played a role in the deaths of hundreds of endangered Caspian seals in Russia last year.

“The loss of wildlife at the current scale presents an unprecedented risk of wildlife population collapse, creating an ecological crisis,” the World Organisation for Animal Health, an intergovernmental organization, said in a statement.