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New Study Says Bird Flu Spread By Wind, Humans, Fowl

PEGGY LOWE/HARVEST PUBLIC MEDIA

As a massive outbreak of bird flu stretches across the Midwest, scientists are still working to get a handle on how the virus spreads. But as Harvest Public Media’s Peggy Lowe reports, it remains a mystery for now.

Up to this point, officials had blamed the introduction and spread of the H5N2 virus on migratory birds.

Now a new government study, released Monday, points to several culprits, including workers spreading the virus from farm to farm and even the possibility that the virus was airborne.

T.J. Myers, a deputy administrator for vet services with the USDA, says scientists thought the bird flu virus could be carried in the wind for just a few hundred feet. The report found the virus could be airborne for about a half mile.

“If we are seeing spread from farm-to-farm that’s further apart than that, this would be something that we haven’t seen before, at least over those distances,” Myers says.

Scientists say the risk of bird flu spreading to humans is very low and hasn’t happened during this outbreak. It has killed 47 million birds so far.

Peggy Lowe joined Harvest Public Media in 2011, returning to the Midwest after 22 years as a journalist in Denver and Southern California. Most recently she was at The Orange County Register, where she was a multimedia producer and writer. In Denver she worked for The Associated Press, The Denver Post and the late, great Rocky Mountain News. She was on the Denver Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of Columbine. Peggy was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2008-09. She is from O'Neill, the Irish Capital of Nebraska, and now lives in Kansas City. Based at KCUR, Peggy is the analyst for The Harvest Network and often reports for Harvest Public Media.