# 2012
Beginning in 1947, on a radio game show ironically called `You Bet Your Life', Groucho Marx revived his flagging career with the help of a wooden duck that would descend from the rafters and bestow $100 on a contestant who said the `secret word'.
The show moved to television in 1950, and would run another 10 years.
Well gang, today the secret `woid' is `asymptomatic', and you guessed it, it is carried down from aloft by ducks and other migratory birds.
For the past three years there has been an ongoing debate over whether migratory birds are a major vector for the spread of the H5N1 virus.
In one corner, you have the poultry lobby, which is only too happy to blame wild birds for the spread of the disease, and on the other hand you have many naturalists and bird lovers who seem eager to lay the blame solely at the feet of the poultry trade.
Many of us, who don't have a bird in this fight, find it perfectly reasonable that both should be major contributors to the spread of the disease. There is no reason why it has to be either one or the other.
The old argument, that sick birds don't fly, and therefore are unlikely to be the source of the spread of the virus seems to be losing traction now that we are seeing more evidence of asymptomatic birds.
On Monday we learned that 2% of the birds sampled in Siberia showed antibodies to the H5N1 virus. These birds, alive and healthy, were exposed at some point in their lives to the virus and either recovered or were never sickened to begin with.
We've seen repeated reports (here, here, here, and here) over the past year from Vietnam, Indonesia, and other parts of the world of asymptomatic birds spreading the disease without showing signs of illness themselves.
This is particularly worrisome because we have always depended on sick birds acting as a sentinel, an early warning, that a flock was infected.
Even if they are eventually sickened and die, it appears that some migratory birds can carry the virus for quite some time before showing signs of illness.
Now we get word from South Korea that the genetic sequences done on birds in Korea and the Swans in Japan are a 99.7% match to one another, a pretty good sign that the virus was carried directly from one nation to the other by migratory birds.
While the illegal poultry trade certainly has been a major factor in the spread of this virus, the evidence mounts that migratory birds play a significant role as well.
Ironically making both sides of this debate right and wrong at the same time.
This report from the Chosun News.
Local Bird Flu Virus Matches Strain Found in Japan
Updated May.22,2008 10:19 KST
Researchers have found that strains of bird flu found in Korea and Japan this year are almost genetically the same. The National Veterinary Research and Quarantine Service said Wednesday that the genetic makeup of a strain of bird flu sampled from chickens in Gimje, South Jeolla Province was 99.7 percent identical to a sample from swans found in Japan's Akita prefecture.
The finding gives grounds to analysis that the latest outbreak of avian influenza may have originated from migratory birds.
Kim Jae-hong, a professor of veterinary medicine at Seoul National University, said that viruses over 99 percent genetically the same are considered the same strain. This substantiates assumptions that migratory birds spread the virus on their way north in March and April after spending the winter in Southeast Asia.
Korea saw its first case of bird flu this year at a chicken farm in Gimje on April 1. In Japan, four swans were found to be infected with bird flu on April 21. This is not the first time that the same strain of bird flu has broken out in Korea and Japan; similar findings were confirmed when bird flu was reported in the two nations in 2003 and 2006.
