Editor’s note: A pandemic in our backyards – The squirrel walked a bit wobbly, it wasn’t as agile and funny as these small creatures often move. It had its eyes rather closed which gave it a tired look. I was concerned and called a squirrel rescue station, luckily there was one closer to me. The poor squirrel got worse meanwhile and couldn’t jump anymore. Lastly, it just sat in the corner of the roof with its head down.
When I brought the tiny animal to the rescue station, its leader Mrs. Heimann told me that the symptoms she saw were those of an unknown virus. She said it was terrible for her to watch two cute squirrels per week die in her care because of that virus. In the last years the health of squirrels got a lot worse, she explained to me – broken bones, malnourishment, paralysis, or DNA damage. Sick animals are more prone to get infected than healthy ones. As I can see the pandemic isn’t over for birds and mammals, it’s right in our backyard and should concern us all.
Diana Bell/The Conversation
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
First signs of a pandemic
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.
A sickness spreading to ocean
Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
Poultry production must change
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
is a Professor of Conservation Biology, University of East Anglia
I have many doubts about the scientific theoretical basis of this article. The fundamental scientific theory expressed here is contrary to many observations made in other cases of similar situations. That is not to say the observations in this article are wrong or invalid, but that they are open to other interpetations.
One major factor is that over the past 75 years or so, the earth has been subjected to thousands of nuclear explosions, nuclear reactors which rountinely discharge radioactive gases and particulates into the air and water have been built everywhere, including on ships and submarines at sea, and depleted uranium has deployed radioactive dust particles over wide areas of several countries. Radioactivity is well-known to be imunosupressive.
So the first thing that occurs to me is that it is not a simple question of a virus. The virus, if indeed there is one involved, is most likely merely oportunistic and the real problem is the weakening of immune systems of organisms that the virus then becomes able to infect.
This was seen very clearly in the distribution of so-called ”AIDS” in Central Africa. In the 1950s and early 60s, when France controlled Algeria, they used the Sahara Desert in the south of that country to test their atomic bombs. They always waited until the wind was blowing south to keep the fallout away from France. It came down with the rain over the next several days in their other colonies of French Equatorial Africa.
The places where it came down were mapped at that time. In villages where there was rain within the right time frame, the fallout hit. In villages that did not get rain it did not. Then, some 20 years later, when people born during the bomb test years became young adults, meaning sexually active, there was an epidemic of oportunistic disease that a healthy immune system could easily fight off. The effect of the pre-natal ingestion of something radioactive was not seen until the fetus became an adult.
The French government’s own research institute, the Pastur Institute in Paris, then announced the ”discovery” of the ”Virus That Causes AIDS” ( tm ). This cover story was quickly confirmed by the U.S. governments research center, The National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Marryland. The American regime also had an obvious motive to avoid being held responsible for the delayed damage to the health of millions in the Northern Hemisphere by fallout from American bomb tests.
The world’s scientific fraternity fell into line and it became official doctrine that AIDS was ”caused” by a virus. Scientists, such as Ernest Sternglass, Professor of Radiation Health Physics at the University of Pittsburg, who disputed that simplistic view were left out of the official scientific journals and the public believed the constant media barrage of propaganda that a virus was the only thing involved in causing AIDS and no mention of possible co-factors, especially bomb test fallout, was allowed.
https://www.academia.edu/99835349/The_Viral_Model_for_AIDS_Paradigmatic_Dominance_Politics_or_Best_Approximation_of_Reality
This looks like a replay of that situation: the immune systems of many, perhaps even most, species have been weakened by some factor, most likely radioactivity from not only bomb tests, but the routine operation of nuclear reactors, including those on board ships and the wide deployment of radioactive dust in countries attacked by the Uniited States over the past 30 years and one or more oportunistic viruses have therefore become able to cause diseases that would not otherwise occur.
Framing the issue in terms of a virus is simplistic and misleading. No virus all by itself is ever a serious problem. All living organisms on earth have co-evolved with viruses and have had millions of years to evolve defenses against viruses and any individual who is made sick by a virus must have already been defective in some way or no virus could cause illness. There are always one or more co-factors. In this case it looks as if the contamination of the entire planet by the military / nuclear industry is the underlying cause of what on the surface looks like an infectious disease caused by a virus.
As usual, this is a problem caused by agriculture, specifically animal agriculture which is the worst of it. We shouldn’t be breeding animals into existence, such as farmed poultry, then penning them up to slaughter and eat. Bad for the Earth, bad for the animals, and bad for us.
Our meat should come from wild animals, but we’re now so far down the wrong path regarding that that it will probably take thousands of years to get back to living correctly. For now, in addition to limiting our families to one child, we should just limit our meat consumption to once per week at most, and try to eat wild meat like fish or deer. Those would be good steps in the right direction.
Limiting families to one child is an obsolite concept. Even China, arguably the worst dictatorship on the planet, failed to do that and finally gave up. Advocating that is the same as arguing for a totalitarian state control over everyone’s personal lives despite the evidence that it cannot be done anyway.
And even if such a totalitarian proposal could succeed, it would still not do any good. There is not enouugh time left before the total collapse of this civilization. A 100% ban on all births would not prevent the collapse that is not just GOING to happen, but is ALREADY happening. It is far too late for any limitation on new births to do any good. That was an idea that might hhave been a valid one 50 years ago, but no longer is in the running.
As for eating more fish, forget that! The oceans are alreeady fished out. Populations of most edible species are down to 2% of their historic levels. If more people start to get their protein requirement from fish that will only speed up the breakdown of marine ecosystems beyond the point where they could recover in the next few centuries after the end of large-scale commercial fishing when the global economy finishes breaking down.
And as far as deer are concerned, 10 million Americans go deer hunting every fall. Only 41% of all hunters in America killed at least one deer in the 2022-23 deer season. This ranged from 18% of hunters in New Hampshire to 71% in South Carolina.
https://deerassociation.com/top-10-states-for-deer-hunter-success-and-multiple-deer-tagged/
What do you suggest the other 310,000,000 American eat?
The breakdown is already well underway and cannot be stopped or prevented. The only thing to do is protect as much of the remaining fragments of wilderness and wildlife as possible so there will still be something left to re-stock the planet after the end of the Human Age.