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SALT LAKE CITY — Bird flu has for the first time been found in alpacas, according to the National Veterinary Services Laboratory, which confirmed detection on a farm in Idaho where poultry had previously been culled because of the infection.
The notice from the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the finding was not unexpected, since the highly pathogenic avian influenza strain H5N1 had previously been detected there among the poultry, and the animals comingled. USDA said the lab testing showed it's the same viral genome sequence that is circulating in the dairy cattle outbreak. The virus has been found in dairy cattle in nine states.
According to the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, "Scientists have closely watched the H5N1 virus for roughly two decades. For most of that time, it has primarily affected birds. In the past two years, however, the virus has been infecting a wider variety of wild and farmed mammals, raising concern that it could be moving closer to becoming a pathogen that can transmit easily between people."
While no person-to-person spread has been reported in the ongoing multistate dairy cattle outbreak of bird flu, three people in the U.S. have been infected with bird flu to date. The first was in Colorado in 2022. The two cases related to the dairy cattle outbreak were among dairy farm workers in Texas and Michigan. Both suffered mild cases of pink eye.
But the World Health Organization notes that bird flu can be deadly and that about half of those who are infected globally have died. Human cases typically involve close contact with infected animals. Public health officials maintain the risk to humans is low in the U.S. but warn that could change if the virus mutates in ways that facilitate spread across species or person to person.
The University of Minnesota reported that the virus was found in four of the farm's 18 alpacas. The university cited a notification from the World Organization for Animal Health, which said the alpacas had close contact with infected birds at a backyard farm in Jerome County, Idaho.
According to the Alpaca Owners Association, more than 264,000 alpacas are registered in the United States.
While bird flu is most often seen in poultry and wild birds, infections have previously been found in a number of other species, including sea lions, as well as "big cats, mountain lions, bobcats, brown bears, black bears and polar bears, bottlenose dolphins, grey seals, harbor seals, red foxes, coyotes, fishers, American martens, North American river otters, raccoons, skunks, Virginia possums and Abert's squirrels. There have been outbreaks in cattle and in mink. But most of the wild mammal infections are considered 'dead end,' meaning a mammal ate an infected bird, got infected and died without contributing to spread of the virus," as Deseret News reported.
