To understand the spread of bird flu, it must be emphasized that “it is not a single virusbut of a very broad set of viruses with their respective lineages and mutations,” explains Martin Beer, director of the Institute for Diagnostic Virology (IVD) of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut in Germany. The wide genetic variety would explain, on the one hand, why infections spread so quickly and, on the other, why they manage to infect more and more species of animals.
One of the hypotheses to explain the current explosion of cases of bird flu has to do with the migratory routes of animals. As suggested by an article published in ‘Scientific Reports’, the viruses responsible for the latest ‘boom’ of infections in Europe could have been transported from Iceland, Greenland and the Arctic through the migratory routes of wild birds.