Why hen poop will be the key to stopping the subsequent flu pandemic – The Mercury Information

By Brenda Goodman | CNN

Cape Could, New Jersey  — First come the horseshoe crabs. Hoisting their spherical, tank-like shells, they trundle out of the Delaware Bay underneath the primary full moon in Could to mate and lay their eggs.

The birds quickly observe. Tons of of hundreds of squawking, migrating shorebirds descend on these seashores to gorge themselves on the protein- and fat-rich eggs. Over the course of per week, a few of the birds will double their weight as they put together to renew their journeys between South America and their summer season breeding grounds within the Artic. As much as 25 totally different species of birds cease right here every spring.

RELATED: Oregon home cat died after consuming pet meals that examined optimistic for hen flu

It’s an ecological marvel not seen wherever else on this planet, and a bonanza for scientists who need to cease the subsequent pandemic.

This 12 months, their work has taken on new urgency as a harmful flu virus, H5N1, tears by dairy cattle and poultry flocks in the USA. The world is watching to see if the menace will escalate.

The work at this seaside might assist make that clear.

“It’s a treasure trove around here,” stated Dr. Pamela McKenzie, beckoning to her analysis associate, Patrick Seiler.

McKenzie and Seiler are a part of a Nationwide Institutes of Well being-funded workforce at St. Jude Kids’s Analysis Hospital that’s been coming to the seashores close to right here for nearly 40 years to gather hen poop.

The mission is the brainchild of Dr. Robert Webster, a New Zealand virologist who was the primary to grasp that flu viruses come from the center of birds.

“We were most amazed. Instead of in the respiratory tract, where we thought it was, it was replicating in the intestinal tract and they were pooping it out in the water and spreading it,” stated Webster, who’s now 92 and retired however nonetheless joins the gathering journey when he can.

The poop, or guano, of contaminated birds is teeming with viruses. Out of all identified influenza subtypes, all however two have been present in birds. The opposite two subtypes have solely been present in bats.

On his first journey to the Delaware Bay in 1985, Webster and his workforce discovered that 20 % of the hen poop samples they introduced again with them contained influenza viruses, and so they realized the realm was a perfect observatory to trace flu viruses as they traveled in birds alongside the Atlantic flyway, which runs between South America and the Artic Circle in northern Canada.

Discovering a brand new flu virus right here might give the world an early warning to incoming contagion.

The mission has turn out to be one of many longest operating influenza sampling tasks of the identical hen populations wherever on this planet, stated Dr. Richard Webby, who has taken over the mission Webster began. Webby directs the World Well being Group’s Collaborating Middle for Research on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals at St. Jude.

Predicting pandemics, Webby explains, is just a little like making an attempt to foretell tornadoes.

“To predict the bad things, whether it’s a tornado, whether a pandemic, you’ve got to understand normal now,” Webby stated. “From there we can detect when things are different, when it changes hosts and what drives those transitions.”

The US is within the midst of a type of transitions now. A number of months earlier than the St. Jude workforce arrived in Cape Could this 12 months, H5N1 had turned up for the primary time in dairy cattle in Texas.

The discovering that H5N1 might infect cows put flu specialists, together with Webby, on alert. Sort A influenza viruses like H5N1 had by no means earlier than unfold in cows.

Scientists have adopted H5N1 for greater than twenty years. Some flu viruses trigger no signs or solely delicate signs after they infect birds. These viruses are known as
low pathogenic avian influenzas, or LPAI. H5N1, which makes birds very ailing, known as an HPAI, for extremely pathogenic avian influenza. It devastates flocks of farmed birds like chickens and turkeys. Within the US, contaminated flocks are euthanized, or culled, as quickly because the virus is recognized, each to forestall the unfold of the an infection and to mitigate the birds’ struggling.

It’s not the primary time US farmers have needed to deal with a extremely pathogenic hen flu. In 2014, birds migrating from Europe introduced H5N8 viruses to North America. Aggressive culling, ensuing within the deaths of greater than 50 million birds, stopped that outbreak and the US remained freed from extremely pathogenic hen flu viruses for years.

The identical technique hasn’t stopped H5N1, nevertheless. H5N1 arrived within the US in late 2021, and regardless of aggressive depopulation of contaminated poultry flocks, has continued to unfold. Within the final two years, H5N1 viruses have additionally developed the power to contaminate a rising number of mammals akin to cats, foxes, otters, and sea lions, bringing them a step nearer to spreading simply in people.

H5N1 viruses can infect people, however these infections don’t journey from individual to individual to this point as a result of the cells in our nostril, throat and lungs have barely totally different receptors than the cells that line the lungs of birds.

It wouldn’t take a lot for that to vary, nevertheless. A latest examine within the journal Science discovered {that a} single key change to virus’ DNA would permit it to dock onto cells within the human lungs.

The workforce at Cape Could had by no means earlier than discovered H5N1 within the birds they sampled there. However with the virus spreading in cows in a number of states, they puzzled the place else it is likely to be. Had it reached these birds, too?

McKenzie and Seiler stepped gingerly onto the boggy seaside this previous spring in boots, gloves and face masks. Their pockets had been filled with dozens of swabs they used to scoop contemporary white guano out of the sand and deposit it into plastic vials they wedged expertly between their fingers. The vials went again into trays that obtained stacked neatly right into a beige cooler Seiler hoisted onto his shoulder as he moved down the seaside. Over the course of per week, the workforce would accumulate 800 to 1,000 samples.

Any flu viruses within the samples can be sequenced — the precise letters of the viruses’ genetic code can be learn — and uploaded to a global database, a form of reference library that helps scientists observe influenza strains as they circle the globe.

The most important white droppings belonged to the seagulls — black-headed laughing gulls and white-headed herring gulls — McKenzie defined. The workforce deliberate to do a separate examine targeted on seagulls this 12 months.

“There are some viruses that we’ve only found in gulls,” Seiler defined.

Some white splats, people who had seen traces of lumps of eggs nonetheless in them, belong to small birds known as semipalmated sandpipers.

A number of yards away, a fling of brown birds known as dunlins was probing the sand for crab eggs with their lengthy black beaks and nervously eyeing Seiler and McKenzie because the pair made their approach down the seaside.