Fears psycho seagulls will be flu super spreaders because ‘they’re everywhere’

Psycho seagulls are becoming bird flu super spreaders, according to a worried expert.

Professor Ian Brown, scientific services director at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, reckons the winged menaces are increasingly responsible for the growing outbreak because they’re ‘everywhere’.

This means that they’re spreading the illness not only between domesticated populations, like chickens and turkeys, but wild sea birds too.

Avian flu has been devastating bird populations for the last 18 months.

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Poultry farmers across all of England were forced in November to move their birds indoors by Defra in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

And Prof. Brown is pointing the finger at super-spreader gulls.

He reckons gulls are infecting birds with the deadly virus because they share nesting areas with them across the UK, from farms to remote coastlines.

He believes the virus, known as H5N1, is also being easily carried by them because it has mutated to adapt to their bodies.

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Prof Brown said: “That obviously opens up other opportunities for spread.

“So not only does it increase the opportunity around poultry farms, another major population… you’ve also got a population [in gulls] that’s quite mobile and moves out and then takes the virus into seabird colonies, which are a bit like poultry houses, because the virus transmits very far.”

“There are some hosts in the wild birds that we’ve learned – things like gulls, so gulls are ubiquitous. They're found around freshwater areas; they're found near poultry farms, but they also get out to remote sea islands where sea birds nest.

“Prior to this current H5N1 [virus] gulls have always been known to be susceptible to flus, but they do seem to be potentially a more regular feature in terms of this virus than they have been in the past.

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“It does look like there’s been a bit of a shift in terms of the virus is actually quite happy to be in a gull as well.”

As a result of the bird flu outbreak, 48 million farmed birds have been culled in the UK and Europe since December 2021.

In 2012, there were 2,200 Great Skua deaths in Scotland in 2022. 7% of their total population died.

The disease stemmed from poultry and duck farms in China in 1996 before it spread to wild birds.

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And there are growing worries about human transmission as the virus mutates, with one study suggesting 53% of folk so far infected across the world have died from it.

That’s a much higher mortality rate than Covid-19

Claire Smith, the RSPB’s senior policy officer on avian influenza, stressed the spread of the disease was due to human actions and wild birds were “victims not simply vectors” of the disease.

She said: “There are likely to be multiple routes of [virus] transmission between wild birds, which will include bird movements. But [the virus] is originally a human-generated issue.”

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