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Tuesday, November 23, 2010

CIDRAP : Satellite tracking suggests wild birds may spread H5N1 in Asia

Via CIDRAP :

" Nov 22, 2010 : Satellite tracking of wild birds in Asia suggests they may be spreading H5N1 avian influenza from India or Tibet to Mongolia when they fly north in the spring, according to a recent report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The Nov 16 issue of FAO AIDE News, the agency's avian flu newsletter, says this conclusion comes from the tracking of waterfowl that frequent China's Qinghai Lake, where more than 6,000 wild birds died of H5N1 in 2005. Since that outbreak, researchers with the FAO and the US Geological Survey have mounted GPS transmitters on 525 waterfowl in 11 countries to track their migrations, the FAO said.

About half of the birds that died in the Qinghai Lake outbreak were bar-headed geese. The FAO said the satellite tracking has shown that most of the bar-headed geese tagged at Qinghai Lake spend their winters in the Lhasa region of Tibet or in India. There, wild birds are exposed to domestic poultry, and since those areas have had H5N1 outbreaks, the virus may spread between domestic and wild birds, according to the FAO.

"If this is so, wild waterfowl on the eastern portion of the Central Asian Flyway may in fact be helping spread H5N1 HPAI [highly pathogenic avian influenza] into Mongolia each spring as they across the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau to the north and east," the article says."

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