Lake Uvsu-Nur area on the Russian Federation-Mongolian border. Detection here of highly pathogenic H5N8 avian influenza in wild birds this past spring led to (correct) warnings that the virus would likely spread to the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. © Alexey Butorin/Greenpeace
Another highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus is marching across Western Asia, Europe, and North Africa, killing domestic flocks and a number of wild birds, from India in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west.
This is the 4th wave of HPAI to sweep across large swathes of the globe in the past 11 years. The culprit this time around, an H5N8 virus, appeared in India in October and the Mediterranean basin in November 2016, leading so far to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of domestic birds and dozens of wild birds from over 30 species.
A potential silver lining to this unfolding story is that this particular H5N8 virus was first detected 4 months earlier, from a lake on the Mongolian-Russian Federation border. Prompt reporting of the find led to warnings by experts of a high likelihood of spread to exactly those regions affected so far.
Was the early warning a lucky break, or have we learned enough about HPAI epidemiology to make such predictions routine? The answer is a bit of both.
.jpg){kind=link}