Bird flu is highly lethal to some animals, but not to others. Scientists want to know why

FILE - A dead sea bird lays beside a dead sea lion on the beach at Punta Bermeja, on the Atlantic coast of the Patagonian province of Río Negro, near Viedma, Argentina, Monday, Aug. 28, 2023. Government experts suspect that bird flu is killing sea lions along Argentina's entire Atlantic coastline, causing authorities to close many beaches in order to prevent the virus from spreading further.

The flu that's currently spreading — known as H5N1 — was first identified in birds in 1959. It didn’t really begin to worry health officials until a Hong Kong outbreak in 1997 that involved severe human illnesses and deaths. Worldwide, doctors have detected 15 human infections caused by the widely circulating bird flu strain. The count includes one death — a 38-year-old woman in southern China in 2022 — but most people had either no symptoms or only mild ones, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The flu strain's ability to lodge in the brain and nervous system is one possible reason for "higher mortality rate in some species,” said Amy Baker, an Iowa-based U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who studies bird flu in animals. But scientists "just don’t know what the properties of the virus or the properties of the host are that are leading to these differences,” Baker said.

Then there's the issue of susceptibility. Flu virus need to be able to latch onto cells before they can invade them.

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