United States – For the first time, team of the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has discovered Bird flu in alpacas.
Farm Contamination
The animals that were found to be positive were on a farm in Idaho, where poultry birds had been found to have been infected with the H5N1 virus early in May this year. The alpacas were found to be positive for the virus on the 16th of May, according to a statement by the USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL), as reported by HealthDay.
The NVSL added that it “has confirmed that the viral genome sequence for these samples is the same sequence currently circulating in dairy cattle… which is consistent with sequences from the depopulated poultry on this premises.”
Impact on Agriculture
USDA stated that it was expected that other animals had already been infected at the farm of the infected birds.
Currently, there are over 264 thousand alpacas in the United States, 208 thousand of which are registered by the Alpaca Owners Association.
Global Surveillance
H5N1 virus has been analysed for almost twenty years now by the Researchers. This virus has predominantly affected birds for nearly all of that period.
However, in the last two years, the virus has targeted a broader spectrum of wild and farmed mammals, which has led to concerns about the possibility that it might become easily transmissible among people, as CNN stated.
Outbreaks in human form have been recorded all over the world over the years, three of which were reported in the United States of America. However, in the current outbreak involving dairy cows, there is no report of person-to-person transmission, as reported by HealthDay.