Fears are stoked in Australia as a super strain of bird flu continues to spread

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

For months, Australia's largest supermarkets have been restricting the sale of eggs to customers during an unprecedented bird flu outbreak. But with spring starting this weekend, there are fears that another, more lethal strain of bird flu, the H5N1 virus, could surge and spark a much bigger crisis. Kristina Kukolja reports from Melbourne.

KRISTINA KUKOLJA, BYLINE: This is not the first avian flu outbreak in Australia, but it's the largest. Three separate strains of the virus detected in May quickly spread from wild birds to poultry in states in the country's southeast. Authorities say around 2 million chickens, or about 8% of the national flock, have been destroyed, more than half on egg farms in the state of Victoria.

DANYEL CUCINOTTA: You're looking at millions of birds that can be culled overnight from something that farmers have very little ability to protect their flock from.

KUKOLJA: Egg farmer Danyel Cucinotta is vice president of the Victorian Farmers Federation. She says it could take up to a year for affected farms to recover and twice as long for egg supplies to return. (Inaudible) outbreak on Australia's sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island; among them, Dr. Louise Emmerson, a government seabird ecologist who works on Antarctic programs.

LOUISE EMMERSON: We're dealing with this uncertain situation.

KUKOLJA: She's one of the scientists monitoring migratory birds as possible H5N1 carriers.

EMMERSON: We know some of those species have migrated during winter to areas where other birds have got avian influenza or there have been outbreaks. We don't know the conditions that they would require to pick that up.

KUKOLJA: National Animal Disease Preparedness coordinator Dr. Brant Smith says the virus spread through the Americas and Antarctica at an unprecedented pace.

BRANT SMITH: Now that we've seen it in the U.S. and spill over into dairy cattle, we have to broaden our preparedness to cover more than just the species we've seen and be prepared for the fact that it could go into multiple species.

KUKOLJA: He fears Australian wildlife could see a similar scale of devastation to other parts of the world.

For NPR News, I'm Kristina Kukolja in Melbourne. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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