Current outbreak, which started in 2021, is estimated to have killed millions of wild birds and thousands of mammals globally

A polar bear has been killed by bird flu as the highly contagious H5N1 virus spreads into the most remote parts of the planet.

The death was confirmed in December by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. “This is the first polar bear case reported, for anywhere,” Dr Bob Gerlach, Alaska’s state veterinarian, told the Alaska Beacon.

It was found near Utqiagvik, one of the northernmost communities in Alaska, two years after this latest strain was detected in North America. Gerlach said it was likely the bear was scavenging on the carcasses of infected birds.

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The current outbreak of the highly infectious variant of H5N1 – which started in 2021 – is estimated to have killed millions of wild birds. Globally, thousands of mammals have also died of the virus, including black bears and brown bears. Bald eagles, foxes and kittiwakes are among the species to have died of the virus in Alaska in recent months.

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  • breakfastmtn@lemmy.caOP
    10·
    11 months ago

    It’s not clickbait.

    Ecosystems in polar regions are particularly vulnerable to bird flu because they contain many animals found nowhere else in the world which have never been exposed to similar viruses. They are also among the places most affected by climate breakdown.

    They’re aren’t saying that it wasn’t thought possible for the virus to infect polar bears. It’s news because the virus has reached a vulnerable species in a highly vulnerable ecosystem for the first time. That was predicted previously but not known until now.

    • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
      21·
      11 months ago

      Begging your partdon, but that seems to not be true? Even the short summary of the article acknowledged that it had already previously reached bears, animals in Alaska, and vulnerable species (bald eagles are still protected), and a quick internet search found this article that says that H5N1 specifically was known to infect polar bears a month ago, from a sample collected two months prior to that.

      The only part that is novel is that the polar bear died this time. Except without knowing comorbidity factors, we cannot even say that it died “from” H5N1, nor learn anything at all about the severity of H5N1 in polar bears from this single isolated incident.

      Anyway, thank you for explaining - people were downvoting without doing that and I appreciate you stepping up!:-)

      • breakfastmtn@lemmy.caOP
        4·
        11 months ago

        Pretty sure that’s the same bear. Utqiagvik is the largest city in North Slope and one of just a few cities in the Arctic. The virus was detected 3 weeks ago but we don’t know when it was reported on that USDA site. That still makes the detection in polar bears and in the Arctic very recent. That information was probably only publicly available more recently than 3 weeks ago.

        The earliest reporting I could find was 3 days ago in Alaskan press and earlier today in nonlocal reporting.

        I still say it’s legit news, and not click bait. Appreciate the civil discussion though!

        • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
          21·
          11 months ago

          I probably was too brief - I did not intend to suggest that it was “fake news” or anything, just that the novelty was of an extremely narrow and specific kind. In looking around the internet at some journalism lingo, “churnalism” comes somewhat close to what I meant. Basically we have this 24/7 news cycle by for-profit companies that in an effort to maximize the stock dividends of their investors must spit out new content every minute of every hour of every day, regardless of how “important” that news is. Which isn’t to say that H5N1 being deadly is not news-worthy! Though I am suggesting that all these articles on this precise subject matter (of this single polar bear having died from it) seem to have borrowed from the importance of being more deadly world-wide, in order to sell their stories about this singular individual bear.

          Next we could have an article on the second polar bear to have died from it, or the third, or perhaps from the first female polar bear (or male, whichever is the opposite of the earlier one), or the first non-Alaskan polar bear to die from it etc. And while each new one can technically be “correct” and “novel”, I would argue that at some point it is no longer “news-worthy”. Yet apparently in this case I would be wrong, b/c some people seem very interested in this new fact!:-P

          Come to think of it, it probably is b/c polar bears are cute. So rather than “clickbait”, I probably should have said that it is “sensationalist news”, meant more to shock and awe and “entertain” (even if in the negative sense) than to inform.

          And thank you in return for the same:-).