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Red-billed helmet shrike

Submitted/Mark Robbins

The Red-Billed Helmet-Shrike has the potential to carry bird flu. KU researchers, who have published reports in doubt of the government's tracking of bird flu, photgraphed the bird in Ghana.

Don't doubt this bird

Researcher questions government avian flu tracking methods

Submitted/Mark Robbins

Mark Robbins, collections manager at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, tests a bird for avian flu during a recent trip to Ghana.

A KU investigator closely following the spread of the avian influenza known as H5N1 said that U.S. government monitoring efforts easily could miss the entry of the virus into North America.

A. Townsend Peterson, University Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and senior curator in the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, directs teams of scientists who travel from Kansas to far-flung corners of the globe to map the spread of avian flu and other pathogens.

Peterson said the governmental plan to detect the arrival of H5N1 in North America Ñ the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Early Detection System Ñ overemphasizes testing of wild water birds in Alaska while neglecting other possible "entry pathways" from Eurasia.

Related audio: Tracking Avian Flu

"If you take a careful look at bird migration in North America, you probably wouldn't want to, excuse the pun, Ôput all your eggs in one basket'," said Peterson.

The KU researcher said that the Alaskan focus of the program is sensible for monitoring a set of wild Asian birds that spend winter in Asia and sometimes summer in Alaska. But other birds possibly carrying the avian influenza could be overlooked.

"There's another component of birds which spend the winter in America," Peterson said. "They migrate north in the summer and basically consider western Siberia to be eastern Alaska. That component of birds migrates deep into the Americas, doesn't really stop in Alaska at all, and would be missed by the current monitoring plan."

According to Peterson, a more effective system to detect the appearance of H5N1 would track wild birds all along the Atlantic and Pacific "flyways" of North America.

"I'm essentially suggesting that we should be considering the entire coastal regions and that the monitoring scheme should be much more based on hard data instead of supposition and just eyeballing the situation," Peterson said.

Peterson's team published initial results of its research on the official H5N1 tracking program earlier this year in PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed science journal.

As of this month, government surveillance remains focused on Alaska: According to the detection system, it sampled 11,819 wild birds in that state, compared with 4,054 birds in California, the second-highest state total. No highly pathogenic H5N1 virus has been found in the samples.

Peterson said global efforts to track the avian flu also exaggerate the role of wild waterfowl.

Early research showed a higher percentage of these birds contained the H5N1 virus, with lower rates among land birds.

"But that seems to have evolved into the idea that only water birds are the reservoir of avian flu," Peterson said. "As near as I can tell, there are no data behind that. It's just that prevalences are higher. What gets forgotten is that numbers of waterfowl are lower. So, how many bird-fulls of virus are out there in the world flying around? It could easily be more land birds than water birds."

These gaps in surveillance plans could slow the response to a serious public health risk.

"It has every possibility of turning up in North America, but it hasn't essentially gotten in the door yet, that we know of," Peterson said. "These are rare events and it can take time. But I see no reason why anybody would believe that it can't happen. If it gets to North America, it's not going to be a terrible plague or anything. But it increases the probability of evolving new virus strains that could turn into something much more dangerous."

With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, KU research teams of faculty, technical staff and graduate students have set out to create a broad-scale, real-world base of quantitative data on avian influenza, in coordination with other flu-monitoring efforts. The investigators recently have tested birds for virus in China, the Philippines, Ghana and New Guinea, and will be working in Peru, Mongolia and Bangladesh in coming months.

RESEARCH MATTERS

Cynthia Teel, associate professor at the KU School of Nursing, is conducting a survey to find the best ways for caregivers of stroke sufferers to take care of their own health. She is evaluating a program called "Self-Care Talk" - where family caregivers spend 30 minutes per week discussing issues such as diet and exercise with a nurse. Teel says participants in the program have had positive results, many realizing that taking care of themselves is vital to being able to provide good care. For more, or to listen to the original broadcast, visit www.researchmatters.ku.edu.