If Birds Aren't Dying, Where Is Bird Flu? - By: Sherrida Woodley

Scotland: Spring 2006, almost a thousand square miles of Scotland were placed under quarantine after the first British case of H5N1 bird flu was confirmed in a mute swan. The bird was found dead in a fishing village, and after extensive testing it was found, as in 80 to 100 percent of birds it infects, to have died of the lethal virus. Conclusion: The swan, considered local waterfowl, had probably contracted the virus from migrating birds.

I kept this small article as part of mounting evidence of recent avian flu outbreaks among birds. The year before I'd also begun writing a novel of a modern-day pandemic, in fact, a pandemic of epic proportions. One that would rival the 1918 viral devastation-with a twist. I wanted the detonation of the virus in my novel to become secondary to the antidote being manufactured to subdue it, and in order to produce that antidote I had to investigate how avian flu affected birds themselves. I didn't have to look far, as articles like the one above led to long and complicated descriptions of H5N1, its origins in various birds, and the incredible life cycle of a pandemic in birds, and in humans. After many exhausting weeks of reading and accumulating notes, I realized there was an amazing amount of information, often substantiated by numbers and well-founded theories. But there was relatively little about common warning signs of an oncoming pandemic. It was only after the disease "reared its ugly head" that people could document what they'd witnessed. The lingering question for me, one that would last for the entire writing of the book, was what is really transpiring under the surface, that perhaps we don't even suspect is going on with bird flu.

So I returned to the basics of the equation, the virus itself. Little more than a dormant particle, it wields no known power until it invades a host. Once that happens, the virus has perhaps one of the most confounding cycles known to man. Neither living nor non-living, it now has the power to propagate genetic information, to take over, and virtually overwhelm the invadee, in this case with the most extreme outcome. Once the host has been laid waste, the virus has, in effect, burned through its potential, eventually retreating into dormancy once again. With nowhere left to go, it seems to disappear. But in some species that's never completely true. From what we know, that is the case with wild ducks and geese in particular.

Most of us have read of deadly outbreaks of flu in poultry in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It is in these places that most human deaths from bird flu have also taken place. But as of 2003, avian flu has been documented as spreading across the globe from the Far East to Nigeria and Italy, even into Scotland. Over 150 million birds have died and just slightly less than 200 people, those numbers, no doubt, having gone up since these early reports. At this point, the numbers are not in the favor of birds. But what is it that makes them sick? We know it's the deadly virus, but what is the internal trigger? The common belief is that many waterfowl, ducks in particular, carry the virus in their intestines routinely and can be carriers without ever showing signs of the disease. It is when they come in close contact with other, less immune birds that the virus becomes virulent and causes massive death.

Why has genetic fortune smiled upon ducks and other waterfowl, like geese? Why is it that they can swim about in droppings and secretions in which other birds would likely perish? The answer, no doubt, has something to do with immunity. Viruses like H5N1 are always mutating, "numbers" spinning as if on some kind of twisted roulette table. Sometimes the blend of strains is mild, sometimes lethal. But we never know the degree until the yearly flu season is upon us. Many of us have been infected by more than one combination of flu virus in our lifetime, and that usually makes us the stronger (although routinely between 3000 and 49,000 people die every year of flu-related illness). But, it's when a new strain comes along, a completely "modernized" version of the hundreds of possible combinations, that we humans take to extreme dying. And often, that same version has gotten to us via ducks, chickens, even swine.

The question still lingers after all the months of reading and putting together a novel-what are we not seeing out there in birdland? In May 2005, thousands of geese died in a north-central China lake, the very birds most notorious for surviving comfortably around H5N1. The virus was similar to a strain in southeast China, yet it had differences suggesting mutation. It then turned up in wild and domestic birds across Russia, Turkey, and Romania. Birds on the move, some of them healthy, some of them carriers, no one to tell the difference-and certainly not to be blamed.

We look to technology and the future of medical technology, in particular, to insure us against the whims of nature, particularly a viral pandemic, and the global bird migrations that have traversed our planet for centuries. It's possible we might make some kind of headway in a year-to-year plan that includes vaccinating millions in the hopes of saving thousands. But, after much soul searching and months of combing the literature for a dependable alternative, it all comes down to one very stark conclusion for me. Pandemics, large or small, are initiated by the slightest variation in one of the universe's smallest particles. Particles that man, just now, is beginning to understand. Nature has been at this a long time, and her birds, no matter how many we slaughter or protect, will carry or react to this particular virus as they always have, giving us reason, I believe, to look to them for some of medicine's most elusive answers about bird flu.

About the Author

Could the passenger pigeon cause a pandemic, then cure it, all the while outwitting extinction? Sherrida Woodley's novel, Quick Fall of Light, considers these questions in a story of a modern-day flu pandemic. A novel of speculative fiction, some have called it an all-out eco-thriller for our time. Find out more at http://www.quickfalloflight.com

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