The first reports of bird flu that cropped up in recent days in widely separated countries–India, Egypt and France–have highlighted the disease’s accelerating spread to new territories.
International health experts have been predicting widespread dissemination of the disease for about half a year, since they concluded that it could be spread by migrating birds. But the recent acceleration has perplexed many experts, who had watched the A(H5N1) virus stick to its native ground in Asia for nearly five years.
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The most alarming of the current outbreaks, if only for sheer size, were the two widely separated episodes of avian flu in India, one of which has killed 50,000 birds in poultry flocks in the last few days. The Indian government, which has long been on alert for the virus because that country is on many migration paths in Asia, began the killing of half a million birds in the hopes of quashing the outbreaks, officials announced Sunday.
But the most perplexing report involved the single case in France–a wild duck found dead in the suburbs of Lyon–because migratory birds from Asia that carry the virus don’t normally travel there at this time of year.
“After several years in one place, why is it now moving so rapidly?” asked Dr. Samuel Jutzi, director of the Animal Production and Health Division at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. “There is a lot about this that we just don’t know.”
In Western Europe, the disease has been confined to wild migratory birds, and authorities across the continent were taking severe measures to protect domestic poultry. Many countries are now requiring that all poultry be kept indoors to prevent mixing with potentially infected wild birds.
In recent days, a wild duck in central Italy was found dead from the virus, the first time it had been found so far north in that country. On the German island of Rugen in the Baltic Sea, 18 wild birds were confirmed to have the disease, bringing the total of infected birds there to 59 in the past week, mostly swans and hawks.
Germany is preparing to kill at least some of the 400,000 domestic birds on the island to make sure the virus doesn’t spread into poultry flocks, local authorities said. When bird flu is detected in an area, the most effective way to control an outbreak is to kill all the birds in a surrounding area to isolate the highly infectious virus, and to ban movement of poultry in and out of the area.
But in India the disease is already in farm birds, raising more complicated issues, and the possibility that there will be human infections. Although the dreaded virus does not now readily infect humans or spread among them, more than 160 people have caught the disease worldwide, all of them people who had close contact with sick birds.
Experts are worried that A(H5N1) could acquire the ability to spread from human to human through natural processes, setting off a worldwide influenza pandemic.
Government officials in a rural district of western India on Sunday began to slaughter or inoculate roughly a million chickens, and dozens of people from the same area were dispatched to be tested, a day after tests confirmed the first outbreak of avian flu in this country.
If it is not swiftly contained, bird flu could be disastrous in India, where the population density and a feeble public health system, especially in the countryside, make it particularly vulnerable to a pandemic of this sort.