How H5N1 bird flu spread across Europe from first detection in 2005, tens of millions of birds, mammals killed
H5N1 bird flu was first detected in a commercial goose farm in China’s Guangdong province in 1996.
Since then, the virus has spread significantly in terms of hosts and geography.
In 1997, the first bird-to-human transmission of H5N1 was detected in Hong Kong. That year, 18 people became infected and six of them died.
In October 2005, H5N1 crossed European borders, attacking a commercial turkey farm in western Türkiye and backyard poultry farms in Romania’s Danube delta.
Croatia became the first Central European country to record an outbreak in wild birds after the virus was detected in dead mute swans, and by December 2005 Ukraine was reporting widespread cases in their poultry sector.
By 2006 Europe was facing a full-scale biological attack, with the discovery of infected wild birds, particularly swans, in an increasing number of European countries.
On the European continent, infection was largely confined to wild bird populations; Only thirteen of the twenty-four affected countries reported the presence of the virus in commercial or backyard poultry flocks.
In most cases infection of poultry was successfully limited to one to ten isolated outbreaks, but Eastern Europe and Russia bore the brunt of the agricultural onslaught.
Romania faced 163 different poultry outbreaks, Russia 149 and Ukraine 42, with the first wave of outbreaks finally starting to subside in 2008 and 2009.
Recent attacks of the virus during the period in question were detected in wild birds in Bavaria, Germany and the remote Tyva Republic of eastern Russia.
National health data revealed that an estimated tens of millions of wild and domestic birds across Europe died or were culled from the virus during the four-year period.
Although exact individual mortality rates for wild birds have not been documented, observational data from national health institutes confirm that mass mortality has occurred in several wild species in Europe.
More importantly, the virus spread to the European mammal world, infecting red foxes, Eurasian otters, arctic foxes, badgers, martens, raccoon dogs, harbor seals, gray seals, and porpoises.
The virus eventually crossed home lines, infecting ordinary household cats and dogs, and then ravaged commercial mink farms in large-scale outbreaks that confirmed mammal-to-mammal transmission.
Spread to livestock became official when the Netherlands reported H5N1 antibodies in dairy cows.
According to official data compiled by the World Health Organization, a total of 933 people worldwide contracted H5N1 flu and 477 of these patients died; this represents a violent death rate of 48 percent.
