“This discovery shows for the first time that the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has reached Antarctica, despite the distance and natural barriers that separate it from other continents,” the officials said. He said Sunday.
Over the past few years, this highly contagious disease has devastated wild and domestic animal populations, making its way around the world on bird migration routes. Now, the arrival of bird flu to the southernmost tip of the continent threatens its unique… Wildlife, including the famous penguins.
The virus has proven strong enough to jump from birds to mammals, striking elephant seals and other marine mammals that congregate on the beach. It has made its way to every continent except Australia.
“We have never seen such a massive spread of the virus in wild birds, and we have never seen such a massive infection of wild mammals,” Ron Fouchier, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said last month.
For farmers, the global outbreak poses a high economic cost as the virus kills millions of chickens and other poultry birds. In the wild, the disease threatens to upend ecosystems and bring endangered birds closer to extinction.
Penguins in Antarctica may not have much immunity to the disease, as the virus has not been documented on the continent yet. Outbreaks among penguins in South America and Africa show their vulnerability. The birds, which like to frolic together in crowded colonies, aren't particularly good at social distancing.
Many Antarctic penguins are already at risk of dying out as rising temperatures deplete the sea ice they need to feed, reproduce and defend themselves. In 2022, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said the continent's emperor penguins were at risk of extinction due to climate change.
CSIC said scientists obtained samples from the two dead karkars using “maximum security measures to prevent transmission of the virus to people” and sent them by ship to the Spanish base on Deception Island for testing.
Bird flu has been creeping towards the continent for months. There have been other suspected cases of bird flu in Antarctica in recent weeks, according to the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research. To many scholars, its arrival seemed inevitable.
In October, British scientists discovered the virus in brown croakers about 1,000 miles from Antarctica on Bird Island in the British territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. In January, in the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, researchers discovered influenza In gentoo penguins for the first time. Another 35 penguins were found dead or showing flu symptoms.
