Nine otters and foxes have contracted chook flu since 2021, based on the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA)
The animals are thought to have eaten useless wild birds that have been contaminated with the virus, however the UK is a “long way” from being in a state of affairs the place people could possibly be liable to contracting the illness and it spreading in the identical means as COVID.
APHA professor Ian Brown mentioned: “These are wild mammals that scavenge on sick and dead birds, and there’s a lot of dead wild birds at the moment due to the bird flu presence around the globe.
“Those animals are consuming and being uncovered to very excessive portions of virus and that is resulting in some spillover an infection.”
Professor Brown added: “We’ve lately detected occasions each right here and around the globe, proof that this virus can on sure events leap into different species.
“To be clear though, this is still a bird virus essentially, that wants to be in birds.”
The first recorded case of chook flu in non-avian wildlife within the UK was a fox in Durham in 2021, then seven instances of otters and foxes testing optimistic have been detected in 2022.
In 2023, a fox in Powys, Wales, was contaminated whereas one individual contracted the virus in January 2022 – an especially uncommon case.
Dr Meera Chand, of UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), mentioned: “Latest evidence suggests that the avian influenza viruses currently circulating in birds do not spread easily to people.”
She added that whereas chook flu was detected in a “small number of mammals in the UK” there have been no “signals of increased risk to the general public”.
Professor Brown affirmed that chook flu was “a long way” from trying like COVID, spreading from human to human.
However, he mentioned: “We need to understand the consequence of this infection. Does it make the virus change by jumping its host? We’re aware those events can sometimes lead to that.”
He mentioned APHA did not have “any evidence” that chook flu may “go from fox to fox or otter to otter” – that’s dead-end infections.
Prof Brown added that it was “difficult to control the disease in wild birds” however “what we can do is effectively control the disease in poultry”.
In the UK, the virus has not unfold from one poultry farm to a different.
“So if you can cut that source of infection off, and we can do that around the world, you reduce the risk of it spilling over into wild birds and evolving further.”
APHA is “watchful” of the state of affairs as is the UKHSA, which stays “vigilant for any evidence of changing risk.”
Source: information.sky.com”