For the World’s Wildlife, it’s Apocalypse Now
Bird-flu, African Swine Flu, Canine distemper virus, shredded US support spell doom
By: Gregory McCann
Perhaps the greatest threat to both livestock and wildlife comes from the wild in the form of H5N1 – Avian Influenza, or “Bird Flu,” which as the world is learning now is increasingly likely to explode into the next global pandemic. Migratory bird species carry a natural, mild form of H5N1, then as they make their journey throughout the globe, they stop over in places that used to be mud flats, wetlands, or mangrove forests but have now been converted into industrial-scale poultry farms. The H5N1 carried by migratory birds is passed to domestic fowl as they stop and mingle, mutating into a more deadly form transferred back to the migratory birds, who then fly on and spread a much more lethal form to both wildlife and livestock worldwide, leaving a stunning trail of destruction in their wake. Bird flu has caused the culling or loss of more than 630 million birds in the last two decades, according to the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health.
The Trump administration’s shredding of USAID and grants issued by US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) will worsen the situation both for people, wildlife and livestock just as progress was being made, against all odds, as Asia Sentinel reported earlier this year. US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is running the danger of compounding the tragedy by pushing a plan to allow the bird flu virus to spread through flocks to enable farmers to “identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” a plan that avian experts say would cause an unimaginable poultry death toll and that wouldn’t work because the virus acts so fast that chickens never develop the antibodies that would beat back the flu and give them the ability to survive a second encounter with the virus.
H5N1 has already impacted at least 485 bird and 48 mammal species, according to a recent report from the Conservation and environmental science news organization Mongabay, killing seals, sea otters, dolphins, foxes, California condors, albatrosses, bald eagles, cougars, polar bears, and a zoo tiger. “Since it broke out in Europe in 2020,” the report says, “this virus has spread globally. Carried by birds along migratory pathways, it has invaded six continents, including Antarctica.”
“Dozens” of zoo tigers have been killed by H5N1 in zoos across southern Vietnam. And just across the border, Cambodia has reported its third known case of H5N1 human infection so far this year. Thailand has been on high alert after a “severe” case of avian influenza was reported in a US national report last year. H5N1 has caused egg shortages in Taiwan and has been uncovered in a poultry farm in Changhua County this year, and has driven egg prices in the US to unprecedented levels. But Thailand has more to worry about than that single US zoo tiger case. As Mongabay reports: “Since it emerged in 2020 in Europe, this ‘Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI)’ strain has blazed a trail of death across the planet, the largest outbreak in history. The virus is both lethal and unusually transmissible, jumping between birds, mammals, and livestock with frightening agility. Experts say the threat to humans is rising. Many countries are increasing surveillance and developing or buying vaccines. Cases are ticking up in the U.S.: Four people contracted the virus from cows and 10 others caught it from chickens.”
As this threat is growing, the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) recently published their first-ever State of the World’s Animal Health 2025 Report, pointing out, as if it weren’t already apparent, that “Animal health is inextricably linked to human health, the stability of ecosystems and the strength of economies. In a world facing increasingly complex global challenges – emerging infectious diseases, climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and food insecurity – ensuring the health of animals is crucial. It is a sobering report, revealing that the reported number of bird flu outbreaks in mammals more than doubled last year compared to 2023 with 1,022 across 55 countries compared to 459 outbreaks in 2023. While the risk of human infection remains low, the authors found, the more mammalian species such as cattle, cats, or dogs infected, the greater the possibility of the virus adapting to mammal-to-mammal, and potentially human, transmission.
Whether it was meant as a riposte to Kennedy or just common sense, the core focus of the 120-page document is vaccination – which “alongside other measures, has saved countless lives, prevented economic losses, and reduced the need for antimicrobial treatments, playing a fundamental role in the fight against antimicrobial resistance. From eradicating deadly diseases like rinderpest to controlling threats such as rabies, foot and mouth disease and avian influenza, vaccines remain a powerful tool at our disposal.”
Some success stories: In October 2023, France’s nationwide vaccination campaign against bird flu in ducks helped reduce outbreaks from a forecast 700 to just 10; Türkiye developed a new vaccine for an outbreak of FMD in just 37 days, vaccinating 14.2 million cattle – 90% of the national herd – and 2.5 million sheep within six months; the Philippines has vaccinated millions of dogs against rabies with help of a WOAH vaccine bank. The country received 500,000 doses of rabies vaccine through EU funding, leading to a noticeable decline in rabies cases.
Yet, as the report notes, access to vaccines remains uneven, and challenges persist in vaccine research, production, distribution, and uptake. Strengthening global cooperation and ensuring equitable access to safe, effective vaccines, alongside other control measures, must be a priority. The authors argue that vaccination is the key to protecting livestock, although vaccines are unevenly distributed across the world. But the threat comes from the wild, because it is practically, if not impossible—is to vaccinate wildlife. The goal is to inoculate enough domestic animals to lessen the threat of infection by wildfowl. Vaccination programs, WOAH’s “core programs” such as the World Animal Health Information System (WAHIS) and ANIMUSE (ANImal antiMicrobial USE) use deep analysis systems for the spreading of diseases in livestock animals and could be essential in saving not just farm animals but human lives as well.
And yet other threats lurk, such as African Swine Flu. The authors of a 2020 report for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assert that while swine flu is known to infect domestic pigs, that it is circulating undetected among wild boars in the forests of Asia. This aligns with what conservationists whom I know who work in Thailand have told me: that swine flu is decimating wild boar populations, especially in the country’s biologically rich Western Forest Complex along the border with Myanmar—one of the few places in all of Southeast Asia where tigers and leopards are reproducing—reducing the great cats’ prey base. Tigers can eat the carcasses of wild boar that perished from swine flu without getting sick, but that will only get them so far. And that is just information from Thailand; it is nearly impossible to know the swine flu situation in neighboring Myanmar with the ongoing conflicts there.
Canine distemper disorder (or virus) is yet another disease that threatens many animals, yet in this case it goes in the other direction: domestic dogs, when brought into the forest as hunting companions with humans, spread the disease into the wild by defecating and urinating and through saliva and pass it on to dholes and jackals, and even tigers. Colleagues in Cambodia put the blame on this disease for the near-disappearance of dholes and golden jackals across much of the Kingdom; cases of disoriented tigers wandering into villages in Thailand and Malaysia have also been reported, likely suffering from Canine distemper.
As the first-ever WOAH report rightly points out, vaccination has played a key role in the eradication of deadly viruses from livestock, including rinderpest (or ‘cattle plague’), and is making headway against rabies and foot-and-mouth disease. However, the main threats will continue to come from the wild, as H5N1 continues to evolve because natural habitats have been converted into enormous poultry farms, and as H5N1 continues to evolve and jump between species, killing off even mighty megafauna like polar bears and tigers within days. And what else lurks besides H5N1? While scientists work on solutions, humans continue to be the problem.
Gregory McCann writes about environmental issues and is a frequent contributor to Asia Sentinel