I guess some of you might have noticed the price of eggs have gone up
but put it down to maybe the cost of living crisis but there's a more sinister reason
It's a longish read but inportant
Please Persevere
H5N1, an avian flu virus,
Here in Spain
H5N1 was first confirmed in Basque Country in Northern Spain From 2003 to 21 October 2022, a total of 868 human cases of infection with H5N1, and 456 deaths have been reported globally from 21 countries.
Bird flu has killed tens of thousands of marine mammals, and infiltrated American livestock for the first time. Scientists are working quickly to assess how it is evolving
And how much of a risk it poses to humans.
Since February 2022, more than 90 million farmed birds have been culled, In the US according to the agency's website.
Most recently, it has infected dairy cows in several US states and Infected at least one person in Texas who had close contact with the animals.
It's now crossed over to other mammals
In their three decades of working with elephant seals, Dr. Marcela Uhart had never seen anything like the scene on the beaches of Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula last October.
It was peak breeding season; the beach should have been teeming with harems of fertile females and enormous males battling one another for dominance. Instead, it was “just carcass upon carcass upon carcass,” recalled Dr Uhart, who directs the Latin American wildlife health program at the University of California,
H5N1, one of the many viruses that cause bird flu, had already killed at least 24.000 South American sea lions along the continent’s coasts in less than a year. Now it had come for elephant seals.
Pups of all ages, from newborns to the fully weaned, lay dead or dying at the high-tide line. Sick pups lay listless, foam oozing from their mouths and nose
It is “an image from hell.”
In the weeks that followed, Dr. Uhart and colleagues— protected head to toe with gloves, gowns and masks, and periodically dousing themselves with bleach — carefully documented the devastation. Team members stood at the top of the nearby cliffs, assessing the toll with drones.
What they found was staggering: The virus had killed an estimated 17,400 seal pups more than 95 percent of the colony’s young animals.
The catastrophe was the latest in a bird flu epidemic that has whipped around the world since 2020, prompting authorities on multiple continents to kill poultry and other birds by the millions. In the United States alone, more than 90 million birds have been culled in a futile attempt to deter the virus.
There has been no stopping H5N1. Avian flu viruses tend to be picky about their hosts, typically sticking to one kind of wild bird. But this one has rapidly infiltrated an astonishingly wide array of birds and animals from squirrels and skunks to bottlenose dolphins, polar bears and, most recently, dairy cows.
“In my flu career, we have not seen a virus that expands its host range quite like this,” said Troy Sutton, a virologist who studies avian and human influenza viruses at Penn State University.
A a simplified version and how the virus has travel down the America's.
Dec. 2021 The H5N1 bird flu virus is detected on the farm in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and in a sick wild gull nearby. Hundreds of birds on the farm died, and the rest were culled. It is the first detection of the virus in North America.
Migrating shorebirds may have carried the virus from Europe to Newfoundland through Iceland or Greenland. Or seabirds that congregate in the North Atlantic Ocean might have carried the virus ashore when they returned to Newfoundland to breed.
Jan. 2022 The virus was first detected in the United States, in wild birds in
North and South Carolina Summer 2022 Hundreds of harbour and grey seals die along the coast of Maine and along the St Lawrence estuary in Quebec. The seals may have been infected by living near or eating sick and dead birds.
Fall 2022 After months of moving west across the United States and Canada, the virus spreads south into Mexico and Columbia most likely by migrating birds carrying it down the Pacific Flyway.
Nov. 2022 The virus reaches Peru, causes a Mass die off of pelicans along the coast, and begins to spread to other birds and marine mammals. Confirmed samples are shown as dots.
Early 2023 Thousands of sea lions die in Peru and Chile, the earliest known mass sea lion deaths from the virus. The virus continues spreading down the Chilean coast towards Cape Horn.
Late 2023 The virus rounds Cape Horn and moves north into Argentina and Uruguay, killing sea lions and seals and eventually reaching southern Brazil.
The blow to sea mammals, and dairy and poultry industries, is worrying enough. But a bigger concern, experts said, is what these developments portend:
The virus is adapting to mammals, edging closer to spreading among people.
A highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 was identified in 1996 in domestic waterfowl in China. The next year, 18 people in Hong Kong became infected with the virus, and six died.
The virus then went silent, but it resurfaced in Hong Kong in 2003. Since then, it has caused dozens of outbreaks in poultry and affected more than 800 people who were in close contact with the birds.
All the while, it continued to evolve.
The version of H5N1 currently racing across the world emerged in Europe in 2020 and spread quickly to Africa and Asia. It killed scores of farmed birds, but unlike its predecessors, it also spread widely among wild birds and into many other animals.
Most infections of mammals were probably “dead-end” cases: a fox, perhaps, that ate an infected bird and died without passing on the virus. However, a few larger outbreaks suggested that H5N1 was capable of more.
The first clue came in the summer of 2022, when the virus killed hundreds of seals in New England and Quebec A few months later, it infiltrated a mink farm in Spain
In the mink, at least, the most likely explanation was that H5N1 had adapted to spread among the animals. The scale of the outbreaks in sea mammals in South America underscored that probability.
“Even intuitively, I would think that mammal-to-mammal transmission is very likely,” said Malik Peiris, a virologist and expert in bird flu at the University of Hong Kong.
After it was first detected in South America, in birds in Colombia in October 2022, the virus swept down the Pacific coast to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the continent, and up the Atlantic coast.
Along the way, it killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, and tens of thousands of sea lions, in Peru Chile Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil The sea lions behaved erratically, experiencing convulsions and paralysis; pregnant females miscarried the fetuses
“What happened when the virus moved to South America we had never seen before,” Dr. Uhart said.
Exactly how and when the virus jumped to marine mammals is unclear, but the sea lions most likely came into close contact with infected birds or contaminated droppings. (Although fish make up the bulk of sea lions’ diet, they do sometimes eat birds.)
At some point, it’s likely the virus evolved to spread directly among the marine mammals: In Argentina, the sea lion deaths did not coincide with the mass mortality of wild birds.
“This could suggest that the infection source was not the infected birds,” said Dr. Pablo Plaza, a wildlife veterinarian at the National University of Comahue and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina.
In some South American countries, apart from a few carcasses that were buried, the rest have remained on the beaches, rotting and scavenging upon.
“How do you even scale up to remove 17,000 dead bodies out in the middle of nowhere, places where you can’t even bring down machinery, and humongous cliffs?” Dr. Uhart said.
The virus has now been found in Antarctica and the consequences for the Penguin and Albatross are immense not to mention the climate change that's affecting Antarctica
And my friends in the isles of scilly are experiencing the same.
Cheers Bryan
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