But 30 of the 290 waterfowl analyzed so far did test positive for other types of avian flu, reported the University of Alaska Program on the Biology and Epidemiology of Avian Influenza. Results for samples taken from more than 4,000 other birds have not been released yet.
"So far, so good," the university announced in a release Friday. "Next summer the news may not be so good."
Alaska is the world's major crossroad for migratory waterfowl, where birds from Asia mingle with birds from North and South America during summer. Scientists fear that birds from both hemispheres could exchange flu viruses here, spreading them into the rest of United States or leading to the evolution of new strains that could infect humans.
The nightmare scenario involves the H5N1, a deadly strain of avian flu that has begun showing up in Europe in migrating birds. Since it erupted among Southeast Asian poultry flocks in 2003, hundreds of millions of birds have died or been killed.
"With a virus like H5N1 emerging in an area like Southeast Asia and spreading toward Europe if it doesn't reach Alaska this year, those birds that go back may very well pick it up and bring it to Alaska next year," said University of Alaska Fairbanks assistant professor Jonathan Runstadler, a lead scientist on the project and a veterinarian, in a statement released Friday morning.
The strain doesn't easily spread to humans, but it has killed half of the 121 people confirmed with the disease, most after direct contact with infected birds, according to statistics posted by the World Health Organization this week.
But if H5N1 were to mutate into a form that could move quickly from human to human, it could trigger a pandemic with millions of deaths. The 1918 flu, which led to as many as 50 million deaths worldwide, was confirmed this month to be an avian flu that spread directly to people.
The H5N1 strain may be halfway there, according to the National Institutes of Health. The virus now has five of the 10 gene sequence changes associated with the human-to-human transmission of the 1918 virus.
Last summer, UAF scientists launched the avian flu program to study how viruses evolve and exist in Alaska birds. Biologists from state, federal and private wildlife and public health agencies obtained samples by swabbing the bottoms of about 4,500 birds in the Minto Flats, Yukon Flats and Yukon Delta national wildlife refuges, Copper River Delta and other areas in the state.
"I think we did a good job for this year in what we set out to do -- getting samples from various parts of the state and from a variety of different species, but there are areas of the state we didn't cover, particular sites and species we could use samples from," Runstadler said in a release.
"We're trying to understand the evolution and prevalence of all avian influenza viruses in wild birds, not just H5N1 -- everybody knows birds are where these viruses come from, but no one knows how they get from birds to humans," said George Happ, director of the IDeA Network for Biomedical Research Excellence at UAF, which provided start-up funding for the project. "We want to identify what genetic changes are important when a normally benign virus becomes a pathogen."
Alaska's samples are being screened by Jeffrey Taubenberger, with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Over the past few years, Taubenberger led a team that cracked the code for viral genes taken from lung tissue in a woman who died during the 1918 epidemic in Brevig Mission, on the Seward Peninsula. Using those samples, Taubenberger helped confirm that the 1918 strain was actually a bird flu.
Daily News reporter Doug O'Harra can be reached at do'harra@adn.com.
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