The H5N1 strain of bird flu has been detected for the first time in Australia, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture has confirmed. This means that the highly contagious variant has now reached all continents.
The disease was detected in a migratory seabird, a brown skua, in a remote area of Western Australia, Agriculture Minister Julie Collins said on Saturday.
The bird was found on a beach in Cape Le Grand National Park, near the town of Esperance, about 700 km (434 mi) southeast of Perth, according to local media.
Australia was previously the only continent where the H5N1 strain of bird flu had not been detected.
The strain can spread quickly among poultry and wild bird populations. Human cases linked to the disease remain rare.
“We all knew we couldn’t be bird flu free forever,” Collins told a news conference.
Collins added that there was a second suspected case of bird flu – a southern petrel found exhausted on a beach in Esperance, while adding that there was no “evidence of mass mortality at this time”.
Threatened Species Commissioner Fiona Fraser said authorities would know “within days” whether the virus was present in other animal populations in Australia, according to a report by national broadcaster ABC.
The report also cited the country’s chief veterinarian, Beth Cookson, who said authorities had been “preparing for this event for a long time” and that the animal disease emergency committee had met on Saturday.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu was detected in October last year in the remote Australian territories of Heard and McDonald Islands, located in the southern Indian Ocean.
A study released this week estimates that about 13,000 seal pups out of a pod of 17,000 on Heard Island have been killed by the H5N1 strain of bird flu since last August, or more than 75 per cent of the entire pod. They also found higher than expected numbers of deaths in penguin populations.
Scientists believe bird flu was likely introduced to the islands last August by migratory birds from the French-owned Crozet Islands, about 1,800 km away.
Avian flu is an illness caused by a virus that infects birds and sometimes other animals, such as foxes, seals and otters.
The main strain – which circulates among wild birds around the world – is a type of virus known as H5N1. It appeared in China in the late 1990s.
Bird migration has caused epidemics in domestic and wild birds and, in very rare cases, has also infected humans, usually through contact with sick animals.