Alaska: Ten villages monitoring for avian flu

Via The Tundra Drums: Ten villages monitoring spring migrants for avian flu. Excerpt:

This spring, Danny Mann will be on the front lines of the avian influenza surveillance effort in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Though the highly contagious H5N1 strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, as it’s commonly called, has never appeared anywhere in North America, public health and wildlife professionals are monitoring birds at the leading edge of the spring migration.

For his part, Mann has signed on as a testing manager with the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. environmental health department to collect 300 samples from subsistence hunters in his village of Kipnuk.

"They give me a call on the phone or VHF and I go over to their house with my stuff. We’re like a mobile unit," he said. "I have gloves, swabs and some vials to put the swabs in. And of course, I document what kind of bird, where it was caught, male, female."

For their effort, participating hunters receive two steel shot shotgun shells –in both 2-3/4- and 3-inch shells, and No. 2 and BB shot sizes – for each bird presented for sampling.

In all, 10 Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages are participating in the YKHC surveillance effort. The local subsistence surveillance effort is part of a larger program in Alaska led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.