US officials test for bird flu in arctic Alaska
Thu Jun 8, 2006 5:10 PM ET
By Daisuke Wakabayashi
BARROW, Alaska (Reuters) - In a coastal marsh near the frozen Arctic Ocean,
a black-and-white feathered spectacled eider leaves a gift for Corey Rossi,
a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Crouching down to take a closer look, Rossi inspects the dropping left by
the large sea duck and then carefully dabs at the greenish mound with a swab
before breaking off the tip into a plastic vial.
"He laid a fresh one there. We really want the freshest stuff," said Rossi,
Alaska district supervisor for the USDA's wildlife services.
The swab of eider dropping is one of 50,000 such field samples from wild
birds that federal and local agencies aim to collect in America this year
and test for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu. Officials also want another
75,000 to 100,000 samples directly from the anus of live or dead birds.
Since 2003, the virus has killed 128 people in nine countries including
Indonesia, Vietnam and China, according to the World Health Organization,
but the highly pathogenic strain of bird flu has not been found in North
America.
The small Alaskan community of Barrow -- the northern-most city in the U.S.
and a crossroads for migratory birds from Asia -- is the front line for the
government's efforts for early detection of bird-flu's North American
arrival.
The work has a sense of urgency because experts fear H5N1 could evolve into
a form that easily infects people and that people can easily pass to others
- perhaps sparking a pandemic.
The role of wild birds in carrying H5N1 avian influenza is unclear, but wild
swans are believed to have infected feather-pluckers in Azerbaijan earlier
this year. The more immediate threat is that the wild birds will infect
poultry.
IDEAL SPOT
In Barrow, as the frozen tundra starts to thaw in the summer, migratory
birds stop to drink and rest in the area's wetlands.
It is an ideal spot to find rare birds like the spectacled eider, which is
on the threatened species list and one of 33 bird species the government has
identified for priority testing due to its flights between Asia and North
America.
Barrow is also considered a hub for bird-flu testing, because it is home to
the world's largest Inupiat Eskimo community. Subsistence hunting of
waterfowl still plays a crucial role in the local diet, and officials can
test harvested birds for the virus.
Even in a birder's paradise like Barrow, collecting samples poses a
challenge to biologists who admit that success is often the result of luck
and lots of patience.
"You could walk around the tundra 20 years and not get that close to a
spectacled eider," said Rossi, noting that this type of duck tends to
congregate miles away on the ice atop the frozen ocean. "Some days, you
spend a lot of energy and you come up with an empty sack."
Wildlife biologists spent two days at a landfill trying to lure a group of
glaucous gulls with whale blubber to a spot where they could launch a
50-foot by 60-foot (15-meter by 18-meter) net to quickly capture, test and
release the birds.
The gulls only approached the bait after the officials left in the evening.
In a separate attempt to catch shorebirds, a group of biologists set up a
thin "mist" net in a coastal marsh only to be foiled when the net billowed
in a stiff breeze, and the birds easily avoided the trap.
The Bush administration's $29 million call to arms to combat bird flu will
involve biologists from several government agencies.
Rick Lanctot, a biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, plans to
send teams of biologists into remote areas of Alaska's National Petroleum
Reserve via helicopter to sample a larger area and increase the odds of
detecting the virus.
"I'm a shorebird biologist, so swabbing butts is not my highest priority,
but it's national emergency kind of thing," said Lanctot, who normally
monitors shorebirds' nesting patterns and survival rates.
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