Ep. 41 | HPAI (bird flu) update, the march across North America continues with Dr. Andrew, USGS Alaska Science Center Ramey

Joel brings back first third-time guest, Dr. Andrew Ramey of the USGS Alaska Science Center for a quick update on bird flu, which has been identified in nearly all US states. They discuss the latest need-to-know info for duck hunters, and if Dr. Ramey gets a free podcast after a certain amount of appearances on ours.
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Welcome back to Delta Waterfowl’s, the Voice of the Duck Hunter podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by three time guest Dr. Andrew Ramey to provide a quick 15 minute update on the status of highly pathogenic avian influenza. Since our last discussion in September, HPAI has continued its march across North America, impacting a growing list of mammalian and avian species. If bird flu has you concerned, you won't want to miss this discussion. With that introduction, let's bring in today's guest. Andy, welcome back to The Voice for that kind of podcast. Thanks, Joel. I really appreciate the opportunity to be back. Yeah, your dog is appreciative of that, of coming back as well. Yeah. He got fired up by the snowplow. And Brice, I got to ask, I think this is the third time we've talked. I mean, do you have like a frequent speaker program here? Do I get like a punch card? Yeah, I think I need to come up with t shirts with, like, little, I don't know, little stars on it or something like that. But yeah. Well, Andy, you're the first three time guest. I think you might have been the first two time guest. But hey, let's let's just keep counting and outpace the competition. But Andy, again, well, come back. Andy is a familiar voice to this podcast. Dr. Andrew Ramey is the the director of the Molecular Ecology Lab at the U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska Science Center in good old Anchorage, Alaska. And we're here to provide a quick update on highly pathogenic avian influenza. Are you ready to go? Yes, sir. We brought you on in. It would have been in April episode 30 for everyone. Anyone wants to listen back. Back in April, we started hearing reports and seeing ourselves, you know, detections of dead or dying snow geese in particular, out in the fields on their northward migration this past spring. And so we brought you on as an expert on avian influenza to just to kind of give us the history. And that was a longer podcast. We took a really nice deep dive and I think you did an excellent job. And we had Chris Nicolai, our waterfowl scientist here at Delta, join us on that one. And then we brought you back kind of a later on in September episode 37. If people want to go back and listen to that one. And we kind of we committed through those podcasts to just keeping the listeners up to date on the state of high path avian influenza. And because honestly, from April to September to now high past avian influenza continues on and it appears to be expanding its geography, its number of species impacted. You know, we're going to continue here. I know you've collected a lot of data from your field station there in Alaska, other banding locations, and those data aren't available yet. But but, Andy, I'd give you a shout here last week and we talked yesterday that that Delta, a lot of our field staff office staff are they're getting just repeat calls bombarded with hey we're getting a lot of of dead birds. Obviously those birds aren't tested. But, you know, the speculation is that it's avian influenza. So I thought we'd bring you on here and just provide a short update. And I suppose, Andy, are you getting overwhelmed with calls or do you find yourself protected from from the phone ringing? My phone doesn't ring with submission of carcasses, per se, Joel, But there is certainly a lot of interest. I think, you know, there's hunters that are interested, biologists that are very interested in what's going on, you know, both waterfowl biologists and biologists working with other species of birds throughout Alaska and elsewhere. And then here in Alaska, there's a lot of people that rely on birds for a subsistence resource. So people that harvest waterfowl in Spring, Alaska is one of the few states, maybe the only state where there's a legalized spring harvest of waterfowl, which is a traditional practice here in Alaska. So that's a very important resource to some people. And so I think there's people from various communities that really are following the situation closely and seeking information about what's going on. Andy, would you mind just kind of providing just a little timeline leading to kind of what you're seeing out on the landscape today? Sure. So historically, it's important to remember that highly pathogenic avian influenza was really a poultry disease. That is until 2002 this virtually, with very few exceptions. This disease did not exist in wild birds per se. But starting in the early 2000s, there began to be some spillover of highly pathogenic avian influenza from domestic birds in the wild, birds leading to disease. And over time, those spillovers continue to occur and it seems the virus is spilling over, perhaps evolved such that they became better adapted to being maintained within wild birds. To the point where we are right now. Joel, is that the outbreak that's occurring in North America and elsewhere in the world is not only a function of spillover events from of highly pathogenic avian influenza, from domestic poultry in the wild birds, that is highly pathogenic. Avian influenza is certainly being maintained at some level, perhaps mostly or entirely independently in wild birds from domestic poultry, such that we're really seeing a lot of disease and mortality among wild birds across the landscape here in North America and elsewhere. Yeah, and I remember back in some of our earlier discussions, we weren't quite sure what direction high path avian influenza would go, because when it popped up in that 2014 to 2016 timeframe, it disappeared really from that. It disappeared completely from the landscape. Or was it just low levels of occurrence for maybe the next eight years? Well, it's hard to say, Joel. I mean, with the best data that we had, you know, there was an outbreak that affected poultry in 2014 into 2015, and there were wild bird detections concurrently, a grand total of 100 detections in the United States and Canada combined as part of that outbreak. But then in 2016, there was a detection in a mallard in Alaska. And when we looked at the genetics of that virus, it actually was a a virus that was from that same outbreak, if you will. So it was maintained in a biological reservoir, continue to evolve, presumably in wild birds for roughly one year without detection. So it's possible is maintained that a really low level, what's occurring now seems to be a different introduction. That is, it's not the maintenance of that same influenza virus in North American waterfowl per se. This looks rather clearly like it's an introduction, actually multiple introduction in to North America from Europe and East Asia. And so if you go back again April, September, it's now December, this again, this we were wondering all the way back, you know, a number of months ago if this was going to be going away or just kind of maintenance. It appears to be expanding now, You know, a longer list of species is crossing over into different mammalian species, and then its geographic range has gone quite far south. Can you speak to to any of those topics? Sure. Great question and topics. When I look at a calendar, Joel, this outbreak now has the first detection as part of this outbreak was almost one year ago, just a couple of weeks shy thereof. So we're now roughly one year into this outbreak. And as you state, the situation isn't really better. In fact, I think there's lots of lines of evidence that the situation's frankly worse. That is, there's been a large number of detections in the United States. The number of wild bird detections confirmed by the USDA is more than 4200. And again, during the prior outbreak, the only prior outbreak to infect Wild birds in North America, there was a grand total of 100 wild bird detections in the United States and Canada and combined. So we're really looking at a different scenario. These detections in wild birds have been across 47 states and domestic birds. I believe it's 46 states. So we're talking a wide geographic range of detections of highly pathogenic avian influenza in both wild and domestic birds across the United States as well as in all the Canadian provinces. I should mention, as well as you state, these detections were not only early in the outbreak and then are petering out. Detections are continuing to occur in recent months and weeks. USDA has recently conducted a rather intensive, active surveillance in the fall, and I believe those efforts are in fact ongoing. And they've confirmed numerous detections among apparently healthy waterfowl that have been sampled as part of banding programs or through Hunter Harvest. So this virus is really fairly geographically widespread across the landscape in a variety of wild birds, including waterfowl that I think listeners to this podcast are particularly interested in. Okay, so some of the detections are are birds that are that, that are dead and have been tested as a result. But then what you just said there is that live apparently healthy birds have our testing positive for HPAI through monitoring and surveillance efforts. Yeah, that's correct. That well stated Joel, that there's certainly numerous detections that are occurring on from dead birds on the landscape, birds that people are clearly identifying as sick or disease or that have died. But yes, there's also many detections that are occurring among apparently live healthy birds as well, particularly live and healthy waterfowl. Okay. So then the geographic geographic distribution has grown with this most recent outbreak. How far south have some of the some of the records been? Well, at this point throughout many southern states in the United States, but thinking more geographically broader, there's recently been detections in the northern, neo tropics. And what I mean by that is Mexico and into South America, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. Wow. And so that that's new. That didn't happen the last go round. That is very much new. So these if confirmed, these would be the first detections of this, what we call goose Guangdong lineage, a virus that's been spilling over periodically and in some cases maintained in wild birds since the early 2000s. Okay. Well, it's definitely this is an emerging growing situation, something that we're going to keep bringing you on here. So I think we're getting a lot of phone calls because there are literally, if you scour social media, hundreds or thousands of conversations of people saying, yeah, there's 50 here, there's a thousand there or some number, you know, that's that's not small. Now, of course, those birds aren't detected, are aren't or have not been sampled. So we don't really know what they died from. But I think it'd be fair to speculate that some portion of them are dying from avian influenza. I think it's important for us to to emphasize to people that, according to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, the risk to humans is still low. It's unchanged. Is that that's your understanding as well? Yeah, that's my understanding. I just confirmed with their web page this morning, actually. Okay. And so there's still been only one reported human case in the United States. And I think that was back in April. That person was sick and they fully recovered from everything that I read. So it's good to know that that's unchanged. And of course, people are keeping track of that. Some of the precautions to take. Again, we both, you or I, are citing the CDC on some of the personal precautions to take. And since the southern states in the United States are still, you know, are they're in the thick of their hunting seasons, what are some of the precautions that that are being communicated? Some of the precautions are when people are out hunting, they should first and foremost, not handle wild birds that are obviously sick or found dead. And then after they get done with the hunt to wash their hands with soap and water, especially after that, the handle game when they're processing their birds, I understand, like the USDA, to recommend keeping a as clean a surface as possible and disinfecting surfaces after processing game wearing disposable gloves might be a good idea for folks if people have poultry. I think there's a whole nother suite of recommendations that they might want to follow. Yeah, that that's some of the information that I've gathered from the USDA and CDC websites. Yeah, it's funny. It's, HPAI, like COVID. It's such an individual response. People. There'll be a wide variety of precautions that people take from from no precautions to possibly not hunting. I've heard some people talking like that. But I do think it's interesting. You know, I did some reading and, you know, how how does a bird how does a human get infected? And what I read was that infected birds shed the flu virus through their saliva, mucus or feces. And then humans, human infections can happen when the virus gets into a person's eyes, nose or mouth. And so that's you know, I bring that up simply because those precautions are don't eat, don't smoke, wear gloves, don't rub your eyes and things like that. And look for to avoid cross-contamination. And this one, I laughed at it before, but I think it's important for everyone to hear this one. People that cook duck notoriously cook it rare, medium rare. And we've always said for years, don't overcook game that one of the recommendations is to cook it to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Need to. Again, that's a personal choice as to what internal temperature. But again, the CDC recommends cooking to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Yeah, it can say that the empirical data just shows that heat deactivates virus for those hunters out there going, Hey, should I be doing something different? You know, all of the the expert opinion and CDC reports say, yeah, take some of those personal precautions, but no one has said don't go hunting, don't take your dog. Just just take some of those precautions and stay the course. Think since April, September, December, you know, at least from a human perspective, it has not changed. All right. Well, I think we're going to like I said, we're going to I'm going to live up to this one and we'll keep it a little bit short and we'll get you back on after the the new year and we'll do a data dive, learn about, you know, adult versus juvenile infections, possibly. We'll talk about different species that and susceptibility possibly. We'll talk about some of the monitoring and surveillance efforts that are out there. And we can talk again, you know, another month or two from now, probably another month from now. We'll talk about how HPAI has changed. Hopefully things start to slow down. But I guess until then, we'll keep our fingers crossed. Joel, if I might offer one more thing for listeners that if they're keen to continue to follow the outbreak in Detections in Wild Birds, a couple of great resources would be the US Department of Agriculture website. The USDA reports Wild bird detections online. That website updated periodically so folks can follow when and where wild bird detections are occurring. Another great resource for folks that hunt or are interested in what's going on in Canada would be a similar website maintained by the Canada Food Inspection Agency. They have a dashboard that's very useful for tracking this high path outbreak. And then finally, the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center maintains a website that has a distribution map that plots where detections are occurring in wild birds and domestic poultry and and wild mammals so people can get information from that website as well. So these websites have just a wealth of information detections that I've been referencing as part of this podcast are reported on those websites so people can keep them selves updated throughout this outbreak. No, that's perfect. I think it's fascinating. You know, we're a waterfowl organization. We tend to talk about ducks and geese exclusively, but looking at some of the Web sites that you just shared and we'll make sure to have these posted in the show notes, but looking at the list of mammalian species, Possum, Fox, Raccoon, Harbor SEALs, Fishers, Dolphin One, Dolphin, but then to get into the to the avian species, vultures, hawks, eagles, you know, it's just the list goes on and on. And so this definitely does have a kind of a shotgun effect on on bird species. And it's not laser like in just affecting ducks or geese. So it is something that self educate. Maybe you could even consider it a form of entertainment, doing some studying on this and learning. We are definitely living something for the first time. And and I appreciate your time, Andy, and wading into this conversation. I guess with that, we'll wrap it up. Thanks again for your time and we'll be in touch. Thanks for the next time. You bet. Take care, Andy.