Category: bird flu

The risk assessment published yesterday by Defra, but presumably done by APHA, is vaguely interesting but not spectacularly well-informed. It’s not that well-informed because no-one has invested in studying the process of disease transmission of avian flu to, within, or from wild birds. So there is quite a lot of guesswork dressed up as something…

Today I will carefully be reading this, Risk Assessment on the spread of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 to wild birds from released, formerly captive gamebirds in Great Britain: Pheasants (click here), which was rather quietly released by Defra yesterday. My aim is to blog about this by the end of the day, but…

Cases of bird/poultry flu in wild birds in the UK continue to mount and are at a higher level than last year.  It hasn’t gone away. Numbers of birds tested as positive: in a previous blog (click here) I compared the number of records of wild birds testing positive for bird flu up to and…

Did you hear Katie-jo Luxton on BBC Radio 4 Today on Monday morning? Worth a listen and well done to Today for continuing to feature news (all of it bad) about bird flu in the absence of Defra saying much about what’s happening (click here at 08:45am, near the end of the programme). I was…

North West Bird Watching Festival at Martin Mere cancelled because of bird flu. A dead Hen Harrier with bird flu from Highland in this week’s non-informative update from Defra (see here).  Also five Gannets tested positive from two locations in Cornwall. Remember, the number of birds testing positive may not be the number of birds…