Photo: ANP
The spread of the highly contagious avian flu virus H5N1 is “greatly accelerated” now that seabirds are also massively affected. Researchers from, among others, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) warn against this. In an article they describe mass deaths among great skuas, a rare species of predatory gulls, on the Scottish island of Foula. These kinds of outbreaks do not bode well, they fear.
“This sudden and unprecedented outbreak of the virus among seabirds raises many questions,” reports marine ecologist Kees Camphuysen. “It was precisely seabirds who had been spared thus far. This greatly accelerates the spread of the virus among wild birds, possibly as far as the Southern Hemisphere.”
Earlier this year, it became clear on Texel and in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, among other places, that birds that live by the sea no longer escape the dance. Bird flu caused clear-cutting among sandwich terns in both places. Thousands of these birds have died. Camphuysen and his co-researchers saw a similar mass death in Scotland. They estimate that the number of breeding birds in the colony on Foula they observed has decreased by 60 to 70 percent.
“What was left behind were cooling eggs and starving chicks,” the ecologist describes the situation. “The freshwater pools on the island, which are also intended for the islanders’ drinking water, were overflowing with the rotting corpses of great skuas killed by the flu.”
The current bird flu epidemic is the worst ever seen in Europe, the European health service ECDC also reported Monday. The highly pathogenic strain of the virus has spread across 37 European countries, from Spitsbergen in Norway to Ukraine.
The NIOZ also calls the outbreak “more intense than ever”. The institute emphasizes the importance of research, not only for animals, but also for humans, who can sometimes contract the virus through contact with infected birds. The research institute refers to figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), which recently calculated that at least 863 people worldwide have been infected so far. More than half of those people (455) have died from it.