First come the horseshoe crabs. Hoisting their round, tank-like shells, they trundle out of the Delaware Bay under the first full moon in May to mate and lay their eggs. <\/p>\n
The birds soon follow. Hundreds of thousands of squawking, migrating shorebirds descend on these beaches to gorge themselves on the protein- and fat-rich eggs. Over the course of a week, some of the birds will double their weight as they prepare to resume their journeys between South America and their summer breeding grounds in the Artic. Up to 25 different species of birds stop here each spring. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s an ecological wonder not seen anywhere else in the world, and a bonanza for scientists who are looking to stop the next pandemic. <\/strong> <\/p>\n This year, their work has taken on new urgency as a dangerous flu virus, H5N1, tears through dairy cattle and poultry flocks in the United States. The world is watching to see if the threat will escalate. <\/p>\n The work at this beach could help make that clear. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a treasure trove around here,\u201d said Dr. Pamela McKenzie, beckoning to her research partner, Patrick Seiler. <\/p>\n McKenzie and Seiler are part of a National Institutes of Health-funded team at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital that\u2019s been coming to the beaches near <\/strong>here <\/strong>for almost 40 years to collect bird poop. <\/p>\n The project is the brainchild of Dr. Robert Webster, a New Zealand virologist who was the first to understand that flu viruses come from the guts of birds. <\/p>\n \u201cWe were most amazed. Instead of in the respiratory tract, where we thought it was, it was replicating in the intestinal tract and they were pooping it out in the water and spreading it,\u201d said Webster, who is now 92 and retired but still joins the collection <\/strong>trip when he can. <\/p>\n The poop, or guano, of infected birds is teeming with viruses. Out of all known influenza subtypes, all but two have been found in birds. The other two subtypes have only been found in bats. <\/p>\n On his first trip to the Delaware Bay in 1985, Webster and his team found that 20 percent of the bird poop samples they brought back with them contained influenza viruses, and they realized the area was an ideal observatory to track flu viruses as they traveled in birds along the Atlantic flyway, which runs between South America and the Artic Circle in northern Canada. <\/strong> <\/p>\n Finding a new flu virus here may give the world an early warning to incoming contagion. <\/p>\n The project has become one of the longest running influenza sampling projects of the same bird populations anywhere in the world, said Dr. Richard Webby, who has taken over the project Webster started. Webby directs the World Health Organization\u2019s Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals at St. Jude. <\/p>\n Predicting pandemics, Webby explains, is a little like trying to predict tornadoes. <\/p>\n \u201cTo predict the bad things, whether it\u2019s a tornado, whether a pandemic, you\u2019ve got to understand normal now,\u201d Webby said. \u201cFrom there we can detect when things are different, when it changes hosts and what drives those transitions.\u201d <\/p>\n The US is in the midst of one of those transitions now. A few months before the St. Jude team arrived in Cape May this year, H5N1 had turned up for the first time in dairy cattle in Texas. <\/p>\n The finding that H5N1 could infect cows put flu experts, including Webby, on alert. Type A influenza viruses like H5N1 had never before spread in cows. <\/p>\n Scientists have followed H5N1 for more than two decades. Some flu viruses cause no symptoms or only mild symptoms when they infect birds. These viruses are called
low pathogenic avian influenzas, or LPAI. H5N1, which makes birds very ill, is called an HPAI, for highly pathogenic avian influenza. It devastates flocks of farmed birds like chickens and turkeys. In the US, infected flocks are euthanized, or culled, as soon as the virus is identified, both to prevent the spread of the infection and to mitigate the birds\u2019 suffering. <\/p>\n