{"id":169833,"date":"2023-08-17T03:22:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T08:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/a-frightening-virus-is-killing-a-massive-number-of-wild-birds"},"modified":"2023-08-17T03:22:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-17T08:22:22","slug":"a-frightening-virus-is-killing-a-massive-number-of-wild-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/a-frightening-virus-is-killing-a-massive-number-of-wild-birds","title":{"rendered":"A frightening virus is killing a massive number of wild birds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-frightening-virus-is-killing-a-massive-number-of-wild-birds2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Remember when eggs were so high? A vaccine for birds, now that can make money. \ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>In the past two years, a viral disease has swept across much of the planet \u2014 not Covid but a type of avian flu. It\u2019s devastated the poultry industry in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, sickening millions of farmed birds, which either die from infection or are killed by farmers seeking to stem the spread.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>The ongoing outbreak of avian flu has killed hundreds of thousands \u2014 if not millions \u2014 of wild birds, including endangered species like the California condor. It\u2019s one of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks in history. Having now spread across five continents and hundreds of wildlife species, scientists call the current outbreak a panzootic, meaning a pandemic among animals.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing right now is uncharted territory,\u201d said Andrew Ramey, a wildlife geneticist at the US Geological Survey, one of the federal agencies involved in testing wild birds for the virus.<\/p>\n<p>The number of dead birds in itself is historic, but so is the virus\u2019s biology. Typically, avian influenza viruses only cause severe disease and death in domestic birds like chickens and farmed ducks; they sweep through populations, killing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/flu\/avianflu\/avian-in-birds.htm\">upward of 90 percent<\/a> of the flock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember when eggs were so high? A vaccine for birds, now that can make money. \ud83e\udd14 In the past two years, a viral disease has swept across much of the planet \u2014 not Covid but a type of avian flu. It\u2019s devastated the poultry industry in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, sickening millions of farmed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}