Scientists gather in St. John's to advocate for greater effort in fight against avian influenza

The world's top experts on avian influenza are in St. John's this week, working toward a global response to the growing amount of the disease being found around the planet.

Andrew Lang, a microbiologist at Memorial University and one the co-chairs of this year's International Symposium on Avian Influenza, said the disease continues to spread around the world at a rapid pace.

Cases of illness from the D1.1 variant of avian influenza were discovered in Newfoundland and Labrador this spring, the same variant that infected a person in British Columbia and killed another in the United States.

"Unfortunately this virus has just not gone away and doesn't seem like it's going to go away," Lang said on Monday. "So we just have to deal with that, and all the new coming changes, when this virus evolves very quickly."

More than 400 people will attend the conference this week both in-person and online. St. John's is the first Canadian city to ever host the symposium.

Michelle Wille, a post doctoral scientist studying viruses in wild birds at the University of Melbourne, said part of the goal of the conference is to highlight the need for greater resources in fighting the virus.

The avian flu panzootic — the animal equivalent of a pandemic — started around the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic, she said. It meant people prioritized COVID-19 over the avian influenza.

"COVID has provided us with lots of really useful tools, techniques, updated platforms to analyze and share data. And so we're really leveraging all of those advanced technologies to help us track avian influenza," Wille said.

"What we're dealing with, the problem is massive. But we are getting very little resources to deal with that globally."

Andy Ramey, part of the United States Geological Survey Alaska Science Centre, said the true scale of disease remains unknown.

Birds across each continent — with the notable exception in Australia — have been infected, and antibodies have even been found in animals like foxes and bears.

Ramey is pitching the need for a unified approach to fighting the virus at the conference.

"One health approach is key here, because we're all connected. There's … just so many ways that health in one sector is not limited within that sector," he said.

"The scale of number of infections that we thought we maybe knew about is actually probably order, or orders, of magnitude bigger than what we thought."

The symposium runs in St. John's from Tuesday to Thursday.

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