An Ohio elementary school recently became the site of an animal massacre you’d expect to see at the start of a horror movie.
Staff and students at St. Bernadette’s School in Clermont County discovered 72 dead vultures on campus after returning from the Thanksgiving holiday break. It took days and mounting media pressure before state wildlife officials responded to the school’s pleas and agreed to collect and test the potentially diseased carcasses. And as it turns out, some of the birds have since tested positive for avian influenza, though the risk of infection to the public is considered low.
Initially ignored
The birds were found on campus December 1, according to local media outlet WCPO 9. School staff contacted the fire chief at Pierce Township, who reached out to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR). Despite the clear possible danger of bird flu, ODNR officials initially declined to help, saying it wasn’t part of the agency’s usual duties.
“They were very adamant that they were not coming. There was a recommendation that you just take them, put them in a bag, double-bag them and throw them in the garbage,” Pierce Township Trustee Allen Freeman told WCPO 9. After WCPO 9’s investigative team contacted the ODNR about the situation, however, the agency changed its tune. Last Friday morning, wildlife officials arrived to collect the birds.
Bird die-offs can happen for various reasons, but one of the most concerning potential culprits is a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza (HPAI). Remarkably, though, the ODNR still wasn’t planning to test the collected birds for flu—at least initially.
In a statement to WCPO 9, an ODNR spokesperson said that since some wild birds in the county had earlier tested positive for HPAI, all subsequent large die-offs (six or more dead birds) are presumed to be carrying the disease. However, a spokesperson for Clermont County Public Health stated that the department would indeed arrange for the testing of two birds. On Monday, the results came back, showing a presumptive positive for bird flu.
A low risk, for now
Avian influenza is a serious and growing public health threat. Experts worry that an HPAI strain can eventually evolve to spread widely between humans while causing severe illness—a combination ripe for causing the next pandemic.
This danger has become all the more present in the U.S. since last year, when a strain of H5N1 bird flu started to spread widely among dairy cows and other mammals. At least 71 people in the U.S. have caught H5N1 as well, while two are thought to have died from it. Just last month, a person in Washington exposed to wild birds and backyard chickens also died of bird flu, albeit a different strain of the virus.
For now, human cases of H5N1 and other bird flu strains remain relatively rare, and the overall risk to the public is low. But the more people are exposed to infected wild birds or other carriers, the greater the chance that one day, we might not be so lucky.
Which is why it’s all the more important to minimize these exposures as much as possible. And that’s also why it’s probably not the best idea to tell an elementary school that a bunch of dead birds isn’t a big deal to clean up on its own.
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