USGS Testing Wild Birds for Avian Influenza

News Release
U.S.Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey

Release Date: March 9, 2006

Contact
Catherine Puckett, 352-284-4832, cpuckett@usgs.gov
Leslie Derauf, 608-270-2401 or 2402, LDierauf@usgs.gov

USGS Testing Wild Birds for Avian Influenza

After conducting tests on samples taken from migratory waterfowl during the past eight months, scientists at the U.S. Geological SurveyÂ’s National Wildlife Health Center report they have found only common types of avian influenza viruses that are expected in North American wild birds.

The tests did not detect the highly pathogenic form of H5N1 avian influenza, the particularly virulent strain that has spread throughout a large geographic area in Asia, Europe and Africa. To date, the highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 has not been detected in the United States.

However, because of the migratory movements of wild birds and the increasing number of countries that have discovered highly pathogenic H5N1 in their migratory birds, the USGS and its partners in 2006 will aggressively monitor and test for avian influenza in wild birds as part of an expanding federal, state and regional detection effort.

Under the national testing program this year, field specialists and wildlife biologists from several federal and state agencies, universities and non-governmental organizations plan to collect between 75,000 and 100,000 samples from migratory birds. U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratories will screen the majority of those samples; the USGS National Wildlife Health Center expects to screen about 11,000 of those samples in 2006.

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