You may have heard about avian flu, and how migratory birds may be spreading the virus around and potentially allowing for new strains to emerge, but you may not have heard about birds carrying disease causing protozoans.
In this peer-reviewed journal article published by EcoHealth, researchers are able to connect the migration of birds through Europe to the emergence of Trichomonosis in several places, such as southern Fennoscandia. This will be the first time it has been documented that birds are transporting a protozoal disease across regions through migratory patterns!
Read more about it at the EcoHealth Alliance website or at BBC or the Independent.
I suspect that this was known for quite some time, but this is first actual evidence/documentation of this phenomenon?
It might be the first time it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal with this type of analysis. I don’t know much about this disease, but I’m going to read up on it now!
All I know about bird flu is that people in Japan freak OUT about it. the first outbreaks that I recall ever hearing about were in 2003, when I was living in Japan, and it was on the news every night. People talked about it a lot.
Yeah, so there are methods to model that type of “freaking out” behavior. It seems to happen most when big things hit the media. It’s a little like how Google Trends tracks flu. This one guy who is interviewing here at EcoHealth Alliance talked to us today about using some data about emergency room patients to model and project flu cases within a state. He said that there was one day were a famous guy went on TV to talk about bird flu, and there was an immediate increase in number of cases, which were mostly not verified by lab tests. Pretty cool stuff!