Daisy
Resident
Bird flu most likely to spread to U.S. from south, study says
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Libby Quaid
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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WASHINGTON ? Birds from Latin America ? not from the north ? are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the U.S. mainland, researchers said yesterday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.
The United States? $29 million bird-flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.
Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.
"The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds," said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York.
If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, a migratory bird could carry the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.
The report is the first to combine the DNA fingerprint of the H5N1 virus in different countries with data on the movement of migratory birds and commercial poultry in those countries.
The analysis helped to determine, for example, that the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey likely didn?t come from poultry imports from Thailand, as previously thought. Instead, the probable source was migratory birds in Russia, where the virus had similar DNA to the virus in Turkey.
The study found that:
? Bird flu was spread through Asia by the poultry trade.
? Most of the spread throughout Europe was from migratory birds.
? Bird flu spread into Africa from migratory birds as well as poultry trade. U.S. officials cautioned that the study is not the final authority on the spread and prevention of bird flu.
http://www.dispatch.com/national-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/12/05/20061205-A7-00.html
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Libby Quaid
ASSOCIATED PRESS
<!--PHOTOS--><TABLE class=phototableright align=right border=0><!-- begin large ad code --><TBODY><TR><TD><TABLE align=center><TBODY></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
WASHINGTON ? Birds from Latin America ? not from the north ? are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the U.S. mainland, researchers said yesterday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.
The United States? $29 million bird-flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.
Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.
"The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds," said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York.
If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, a migratory bird could carry the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.
The report is the first to combine the DNA fingerprint of the H5N1 virus in different countries with data on the movement of migratory birds and commercial poultry in those countries.
The analysis helped to determine, for example, that the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey likely didn?t come from poultry imports from Thailand, as previously thought. Instead, the probable source was migratory birds in Russia, where the virus had similar DNA to the virus in Turkey.
The study found that:
? Bird flu was spread through Asia by the poultry trade.
? Most of the spread throughout Europe was from migratory birds.
? Bird flu spread into Africa from migratory birds as well as poultry trade. U.S. officials cautioned that the study is not the final authority on the spread and prevention of bird flu.
http://www.dispatch.com/national-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/12/05/20061205-A7-00.html
