Mass death of sea lions from avian flu suggests virus can jump between mammals: “This is worrying” | Abroad

Hundreds of sea lions that washed up dead or dying on the beaches of Peru suffered convulsions and drowned before dying. Nothing like this had ever been seen in the region. Now a team of scientists from Peru and Argentina confirms that the mass deaths were caused by the transmission of the bird flu virus from seabirds to these wild mammals. At the end of last year, the same thing is said to have happened in a Spanish mink farm.

According to the scientists’ main theory, the 634 dead sea lions were infected one by one, independently of each other, because they lived with sick birds or because they ate them.

Dutch veterinarian and bird flu expert Thijs Kuiken is skeptical about this hypothesis: “Given the large number of dead specimens, it seems more likely that there was a direct transmission between sea lions,” says Kuiken of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam.

“It is worrying,” warns the vet. “This is the second episode of mass mortality suggesting that this virus can easily adapt to efficient mammal-to-mammal transmission. If it happens in minks and sea lions, why doesn’t it happen in humans?” he continues.

In an interview with Dutch newspaper De Correspondent, Kuiken discusses the chance that the avian flu virus will mutate to easily infect people and jump from person to person. “The chance of it happening is small, but it keeps getting bigger. On the other hand, the impact of that event is very large. If it does jump to humans, and it passes easily from person to person, then we will have another pandemic and it will go all over the world. We don’t know how serious that will be. It can be as mild as the 2009 flu pandemic, or it can be as severe as the pandemic everyone knows: the Spanish flu of 1918.”

According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, as many as 50 million birds were killed in Europe between October 2021 and September 2022 after being infected with avian flu. The virus has already jumped from bird to mammal several times, and in exceptional cases even from bird to human. For example, on January 3, a 9-year-old girl from Ecuador was hospitalized in a critical condition. She had come into contact with poultry and later became the first reported case of human infection from the bird flu virus in Latin America.