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You may recall that in December, 2006, an article appeared in MSBNC.com.

Govt. is looking in wrong place for bird flu Birds from Latin America most likely to bring virus to U.S., study says

WASHINGTON - Birds from Latin America — not from the north — are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the main U.S., researchers said Monday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.

The United States’ $29 million bird flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.

Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.

Poultry trade riskier than migratory birds
“The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds,” said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York. Other researchers on the study came from the Smithsonian Institution.

If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, it could be a matter of time before a migratory bird carries the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.

“It’s not just a matter of worrying about who you trade with, but it’s a matter of thinking about who do your neighbors trade with, and who do your trading partners trade with,” Kilpatrick said. “We need to be looking both south and north.”

The study concluded that “current American surveillance plans that focus primarily on the Alaskan migratory bird pathway may fail to detect the introduction of H5N1 into the United States in time to prevent its spread into domestic poultry.”

The report is the first to combine the DNA fingerprint of the H5N1 virus in different countries with data on the movement of migratory birds and commercial poultry in those countries.

The analysis helped to determine, for example, that the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey likely didn’t come from poultry imports from Thailand, as previously thought. Instead, the probable source was migratory birds in Russia, where the virus had similar DNA to the virus in Turkey.

The study found that:

• Bird flu was spread through Asia by the poultry trade.
• Most of the spread throughout Europe was from migratory birds.
• Bird flu spread into Africa from migratory birds as well as poultry trade.

U.S. officials cautioned that the study is not the final authority on the spread and prevention of bird flu.

'A big puzzle'
“When you look at scientific literature, it’s a big puzzle. This puts in a few more pieces,” said David Swayne, director of the Agriculture Department’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga.

Swayne cautioned that researchers looked only at countries’ import restrictions through 2005.

“I’m not saying it’s the fault of the study; the study is designed to look at what happened in the past,” Swayne said. “We have to be very careful not to over-interpret. There is a limit on how recent the data is.”

In addition, Agriculture Department officials said they are not focusing exclusively on Alaska.

More resources have been spent in Alaska than in other states so far, but testing is happening throughout the lower 48, and the U.S. is even helping Mexico do surveillance, said Tom DeLiberto, the department’s National Wildlife Disease Coordinator.

“We have more information now than we did when we designed the surveillance effort last fall,” DeLiberto said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16043274

When that article ran, I called my sources at the University of Florida (Go Gators! Go Tebow!). UF has an ongoing program designed to map the migratory routes of wild birds throughout South America, but the program has met with little overall success. The reasons? Among other things, that region is a hotbed of geopolitical instability. Unlike in North America and Europe, many South American and Central American nations palpably don't like each other very much. Drug cartels, Maoist guerrillas, and despots abound. Their level of distrust is heightened by the shenanigans of such wretched types as Venezuela's tyrant-in-training, Hugo Chavez, and his clear efforts at destabilizing the region. For those who take issue: Newsweek's expose regarding how Chavez and his "reform" proposals got their asses kicked in the recent elections and the Venezuelan military's declaration that if Chavez tried to overturn the election results (he tried, oh how he tried to overturn them) would prompt a coup de tat, they sat down and "negotiated" a face-saving 51% to 49% defeat. What a cur.

But I digress. Fact of the matter is, there are pitifully few well-mapped migratory wildfowl routes in the Americas south of Mexico. This seriously hampers efforts at surveillance, because if you don't know where the birds migrate to and from, you don't know what you don't know.

Over two-thirds of all the landbirds that breed in temperate North America, for example, migrate long distances to nonbreeding areas in Mexico, Central and South America and the islands of the Caribbean (Keast and Morton 1980, Rappole 1995).

That's it??!!

Not quite. Another reference, from the University of Florida paper titled " The potential for applying current research techniques on migratory bird biology in South America" http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/ajahn/applying%20tech1.htm , states:

Ironically, very little information exists on the migratory strategies of virtually any of the migratory bird species on the continent that is home to the world’s richest avifauna, South America. This condition exists in spite of the fact that austral migration, in which migration occurs between temperate and tropical South America, is one of the major avian migratory systems in the world and the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (Chesser 1994). With unique habitats, topographies and rapidly growing environmental alteration by humans, potential threats unique to South American migrants which depend on a range of resources across wide ranges throughout the year, may be significant.

Okay, let's review. We know we currently have low-path bird flu (H5N2) in the Dominican republic. We also know that there is a lax approach taken to poultry management and poultry health in Mexico, and other places in the Americas. We also know there is a real lack of hard data on where migratory birds go when they venture South of the Equator. We also know that things have a way of coming up from Down There, namely killer bees, dengue fever (see my latest post on dengue), and other maladies also venture up from the Americas all the time. Here's the latest: Suddenly, yellow fever is back on the list of things Brazilians are worrying about (see “Millions in Brazil seek shots in yellow fever scare” http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN15407443  with a hat-tip to Slawdog..

These lessons, apparently, have not been lost on the US government, which for some strange reason seems to be actually reading these articles and acting upon them! From last week:

Bird flu: US/Chile coordinate detection in Tierra del

Fuego