" I can advise that today the consultative committee on animal diseases, emergency animal diseases met and has agreed based on testing and sequencing by the CSRO lab that some local transmission has occurred between a number of greater crested terns that are resident in South Australia.
While there remains no evidence of any mass mortalities at this point in time, we do expect with this local transmission that there will be further detections in Australian wildlife." - From Transcript of remarks by Agriculture Minister Julie Collins
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Overnight South Australia updated their avian flu web portal, announcing that another 11 presumed positive samples have been sent to CSIRO for confirmation and genetic testing.
South Australia’s first confirmed detection of H5 bird flu was in a wild migratory bird (southern giant petrel) on Wednesday, 24 June at Knights Beach at Port Elliot on the Fleurieu Peninsula.
Further confirmed detections include a giant petrel (8 July at Hardwicke Bay, Yorke Peninsula); a southern giant petrel (10 July at Emu Bay, Kangaroo Island); a northern giant petrel (10 July at Port Vincent, Yorke Peninsula); three greater crested terns (10 July at Robe, Limestone Coast; 26 July at Semaphore, metro Adelaide; and 26 July at Robe, Limestone Coast); and seven greater crested terns (28 July at Cape Jaffa, Port MacDonnell and Southend, Lower South East).
A further 11 suspected H5 bird flu detections are undergoing further confirmatory testing at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Victoria.
The strain of virus is consistent with the strain detected in the Southern Indian Ocean Sub-Antarctic Territories, including Heard Island.
This strain has not been detected in poultry and has not become established in any part of Australia.
Up-to-date national information is available at birdflu.gov.au .
This comes just 1 day after CSIRO confirmed 7 new cases in local seabirds from the state's southeast Limestone Coast. The results of those tests also strongly suggest local transmission of the virus has occurred among native birds.
Although disappointing, none of this is particularly surprising.
The history with HPAI H5 - particularly since the emergence and subsequent evolution of the 2.3.4.4x clade - has been that it travels well in migratory birds, and that when it reaches new territories, it often finds suitable native hosts.
While the situation in Australia continues to evolve, so far there are no reports of spillovers into poultry.
Yesterday, the above mentioned data was published in a preprint on bioRxiv.
HPAI H5N1 risk in Australia: a model for the prediction of poultry outbreaks
Pan Zhang, Samsung Lim, Ashley Quigley, C Raina MacIntyre
doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.27.740638
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review
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Abstract
The panzootic highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus has now been detected on the Australian mainland, with incursions from the sub-Antarctic region posing an increasing threat to domestic wildlife and poultry populations. Our study aimed to predict the risk of HPAI H5N1 poultry outbreaks across Australia at the local government area (LGA) level using a range of influential risk factors.
We first used a Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model to estimate the environmental suitability for HPAI H5N1 occurrence across Australia. The resulting suitability layer was then integrated with five additional predictor layers, including abundance data for two Southern Ocean wild birds, one of which has introduced HPAI H5N1 into Australia; abundance data for 28 native Australian wild birds; native bird flyways across Australia; Australian chicken density; and poultry farm density. The six layers were aggregated and averaged to generate an HPAI H5N1 risk map for poultry outbreaks across Australian LGAs.
Although most incursions have occurred in Western Australia (WA) and South Australia (SA), we identified New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria (VIC) as having the highest predicted risk of HPAI H5N1 poultry outbreaks. Additional high-risk areas were identified in WA, SA, and Tasmania (TAS).
In contrast, the Northern Territory (NT) and large parts of Queensland (QLD), WA, and SA were predicted to be at low risk. These findings provide a spatially explicit framework to support targeted surveillance, preparedness, and biosecurity measures aimed at mitigating the impact of future HPAI H5N1 outbreaks in Australian poultry.
The Australian government has provided a number of resources for both commercial and backyard poultry producers to help improve their biosecurity:
Biosecurity manuals
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