The First American Death From Bird Flu—This Year
The Atlantic · Roxanne Khamsi ·
It’s flu season. Is it also bird-flu season?
At the beginning of November, Washington State announced that one of its residents had died from bird flu. The announcement had an air of déjà vu to it: Around this time last year, another person in Washington State died of a related form of the virus—the third bird-flu death in the U.S. and the last reported fatality from the illness in the country until now. Autumn is beginning to look more clearly like the start of bird-flu season for livestock, and, by extension, the time of year that the spillover risk to humans could be highest. The question now is whether these patterns will hold—whether the dramatic rise of the flu among wild species may ultimately contribute to a seasonal uptick among farmed animals, which in turn could cause more cases in people each autumn.
North America had never really been troubled by bird flu until a few years ago, when waterfowl traveling from Europe to Canada brought a new kind of the virus with them, one that was well adapted to migratory birds. Since then, the pathogen has infected more than 2,200 commercial and backyard poultry flocks in the United States, totaling more than 200 million birds, the government estimated in September. More than 70 human cases have been confirmed in the country, and many more have likely gone undetected. Most of those people—including all three who have died—seem to have gotten the disease from livestock.
All the while, this highly pathogenic virus has been infecting more wild birds, and scientists have been trying to understand how. Over the past few years, they have identified changes in the virus that have made certain waterfowl, particularly mallard ducks, a bigger culprit than they once were in spreading bird flu across long distances. “There are some species of ducks that are like Typhoid Marys, moving the virus around the landscape,” Nichola Hill, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who studies bird flu, told me.
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