Bird Flu Reaches Islands Near Antarctica

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S​cientists at a remote research station in the middle of the far southern Atlantic Ocean noticed that birds were getting sick and dying.

T​hen they made a disturbing discovery.

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T​he birds, called skuas and common to the area, tested positive for avian influenza. The news, announced Monday by the British Antarctic Survey, marks the first time bird flu has been found in the pristine region around Antarctica.

"This is gutting," Bird Island Science Manager Ash Bennison said in a social media post.

H​ere's why.

T​he research station is at a place called Bird Island, where scientists study one of the most closely monitored colonies of sea birds in the world. It's located southeast of Argentina about 1,000 miles from the tip of Antarctica, which is one of only two continents in the world without a single recorded case of bird flu. The other is Australia.

T​he particular type of bird flu circulating right now can be especially lethal. For that reason it's called Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI for short. More than 59 million birds have been affected in the United States alone since the outbreak started in January 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In September, scientists said Antarctica and surrounding areas were at high risk. “The arrival of HPAI in the region would have a devastating impact on many wildlife species in the region and could lead to catastrophic breeding failure and mortality events," Meagan Dewar, Chair of the Antarctic Wildlife Health Network and lead author of the report, said in a statement posted online.

R​esearchers at Bird Island think migrating skuas brought bird flu from Argentina. Bird flu only recently reached South America and quickly spread. It's been blamed not only for deaths of birds but also scores of seals and sea lions. Avian influenza can spread to non-bird species but is very rare in humans.

Some species could be completely wiped out. “There are species on some of the Antarctic islands and sub-Antarctic islands that are unique to those islands, and only occur in small numbers, in hundreds or thousands,” Thijs Kuiken, a researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, told New Scientist. “If the virus reaches those populations, they are in threat of extinction.”

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