#19,270
No sooner has I posted my last blog when the following statement was posted on the Australian government website:
30 July 2026
Attributable to Australian Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr Beth Cookson:
Testing at CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP) has returned four positive results in crested terns, from Kangaroo Island, South Australia.
There have now been 33 confirmed or presumed positive detections of H5 bird flu in Australia.
All of these have been wild seabirds found in coastal locations.
There remains no evidence of any mass mortality events and there are no detections in poultry or in our agricultural production system.
The risk to human health remains low.
While not particularly surprising given its proximity to the other SA confirmed seabirds, this is a concern because Kangaroo Island is home to a number of marine mammals which are known to be susceptible to avian flu, including:
- Australian sea lion.
- Australian fur seal.
- New Zealand fur seal.
- Bottlenose dolphin and common dolphin.
Last October H5N1 was detected on Australia's Heard Island - which we recently revisited in Preprint: Mass mortality of southern elephant seals during multi-species outbreak of HPAI H5N1 on sub-Antarctic Heard Island - which reported:
Drone surveys revealed mass mortality in southern elephant seals, with 8,573 pups (62%) recorded dead across Heard Island by the final surveys. Mortality increased at an average rate of 5.6% per day in a subset of harems, and the highest observed mortality in a harem was 97%. Based on the average (76%) mortality in the final surveys, total estimated pup mortality at Heard Island was 13,359 (from a total population of 17,364 pups), though this may be an underestimate as mortality was ongoing at this time.HPAI was detected in six of nine species tested and, we suspect, led to elevated mortality in king and gentoo penguins.
While there is currently no evidence of spillover into Kangaroo Island's marine or terrestrial mammalian population, this is another worrisome milestone for HPAI as it spreads across Oceania.
