The USGS Research Strategy for Highly Pathogenic Bird Flu

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) reached North America in December 2014, found in poultry in Canada and in migratory birds in the United States. It has since spread across much of the country, killing or forcing the culling of millions of domestic birds, and is expected to linger in North American wild birds for years. These strains are not known to sicken people, though CDC advises caution around infected birds; others, such as H5N1, which since 1996 has hit poultry farms in Eurasia and North Africa and killed several hundred people, show the wider stakes. The U.S. Geological Survey, which has studied avian influenza since 2006, set out a research strategy to meet the threat. (Its wider role is described in a companion fact sheet.)

Where wild birds and poultry meet

Migratory bird flyways and total poultry sold by state in 2012. Asian and North American flyways overlap in Alaska, opening routes for viruses into North America, and the flyway where HPAI turns up shapes the risk to the U.S. poultry industry. Poultry data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture. USGS.

What the USGS brings

Its capabilities span disease ecology and risk modelling; surveillance of wild birds and the environment; diagnostic and research laboratories, part of the USDA's National Animal Health Laboratory Network; the ecology and migration of birds and how they spread disease; next-generation sequencing of viral genomes; decision-support tools; and international partners. The USGS tests thousands of samples a year from across the United States and neighbouring countries, and was instrumental in the first response to HPAI in North America's wild birds, sampling live birds and investigating deaths.

The five goals

The USGS HPAI research strategy. USGS.

The strategy builds on existing USGS work to give natural resource managers, poultry producers and public health officials the science and risk tools they need:

1. Augment the national HPAI surveillance plan, the federal interagency plan for finding the virus in wild birds.
2. Determine how HPAI spreads in wildlife and the environment.
3. Characterise the HPAI viruses circulating in wildlife.
4. Understand how bird ecology affects spread.
5. Develop forecasting and decision-making tools that bring the science to managers.

Goals 2 to 4 improve understanding of how the virus behaves in wildlife and the environment; goal 5 turns that into tools.

From goals 1 and 2: bald eagles prey on fish and waterbirds. USGS research found some birds of prey are sensitive to HPAI, and surveillance found infected prey had killed raptors, including a bald eagle. Photograph by B. Uher-Koch, U.S. Geological Survey.

An example of goal 5: with the Food and Agriculture Organization, the USGS mapped the risk of HPAI passing between wild birds and poultry in China, and similar risk models are being built for the U.S. outbreak (avian influenza tools).

Sources

• M. Camille Harris, A. Keith Miles, John M. Pearce, Diann J. Prosser, Jonathan M. Sleeman and Mary E. Whalen, USGS highly pathogenic avian influenza research strategy, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2015–3060. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/fs20153060
• A screenshot of the China risk-map tool is not reproduced here.