Humans next? Avian influenza now being detected in mammals - otters, foxes, seals and porpoises included.

Scavenging for dead birds could prove perilous for foxes

WILL avian influenza soon start to rampage through the world's mammal population as it has done in birds?

This is a new fear after it emerged that cases have now been detected in such species as red fox, otter, grey seal, harbour seal and harbour porpoise.  

In the United States, cases have also been reported in juvenile grizzly bears and ferrets.

The likelihood is that the route of infection for these cases was contact with infected birds.

Few details have been released by the Animal and Plant Health Agency except to say that the four UK otter cases were all in Scotland - one in Shetland, one on Skye and two in Fife.

The fox cases, meanwhile, were all in England though the locations have not been identified.

There are concerns that this H5N1 virus could mutate into new forms and spready quickly - possibly to dogs and cats, thence to humans.

In a case in Galicia, North-west Spain, 52,000 infected mink on a farm were humanely destroyed last autumn according to a report in Eurosurveillance - a journal that focuses on infectious disease surveillance, epidemiology, prevention and control.

The minks had been fed with raw fish and poultry by-products, cereals and blood meal, but the infection has been attributed to herring gulls because the mink were being farmed in semi-open premises. 

Of the farm's 12 staff, 11 who had been in contact with the animals were subjected to two days of naso-pharyngeal swabs which all tested negative for avian influenza virus, but, to be on the safe side, they were still put in semi-quarantine for 10 days. 

H5N1 was first detected at a goose farm in China in 1996 and, around 2005, it spilled into migratory birds, since when it has spready globally in huge waves.

A new variant that emerged in 2020 has spread faster and farther than any predecessor, hammering the poultry industry in Europe and the Americas.

According to the BTO, it has been confirmed in no fewer than 61 wild bird species.

So far there are understood to have been just six confirmed human infections, including one death, but there are worries among some scientists that the virus might be spreading under the radar. 

                                             

Avian influenza victim? A poorly-looking oystercatcher