The rising threat of bird flu

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Hello, delightful, curious-minded listeners.

Welcome to BBC Inside Science.

I'm Victoria Gill.

And this week, I pay a visit to a town where people live alongside one of the planet's biggest predators, discovering how new technology is helping humans and polar bears to coexist.

And we're asking how how on earth you transport a substance that cannot come into contact with anything and that could reveal some of the secrets of the origin of our universe.

But first, to the virus that every public health expert is watching, bird flu.

Avian influenza is a prime candidate for the next major pandemic, specifically the subtype known as H5N1.

It's a virus that's been on the scene for decades, but it particularly piqued virologists' interests this year when it spread through multiple herds of dairy cattle in the US.

And just this week, a paper in the journal Science made headlines claiming that one mutation could increase the risk of human-to-human transmission.

It's a lot to take in.

So, joining me to figure out exactly what's been happening are virologist Tom Peacock and Melody Schreiber, a science writer who's done a lot of reporting on this topic.

Welcome, both of you.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us.

Can I start by asking each of you, when did you first notice this was a virus to watch?

H5N1's been around for a little while now, or at least it's been on people's radars since a big cluster of human infections in Hong Kong in the late 1990s.

I guess the resurgence of H5N1 has been the last few years, particularly from 2020 onwards, when it really started causing waves in Europe initially in poultry and wild birds.

But then since then, it's kind of gone from strength to strength and got into North America and South America, and then started doing all sorts of weird and concerning things infecting.

species that it hasn't really infected before.

I started reporting on it last year when it first crossed over into birds in North America.

And then it really became a big story earlier this year when it was detected in livestock for the first time.

That had never happened before.

So it instantly became, you know, this virus is doing something that we haven't seen before.

And Melody, what is happening in terms of human cases of H5N1?

The U.S.

currently has, I believe, 55 confirmed cases, another, I think, six probable cases.

That is a massive change.

Prior to this year, we had one H5N1 case ever.

So the number is significantly higher than it has been.

And we're also not detecting all of the cases.

What does that mean that some of them are asymptomatic?

How do you know there's more cases out there than we can actually see and detect?

A great question.

So back in November, the CDC released the results of blood testing in Michigan showing that dairy farm workers had antibodies to H5N1, but they had not reported symptoms and they had never tested for H5N1.

So that means more dairy farm workers are getting this virus than are being detected.

So we are not detecting all of the human cases happening.

I should say that there are no human cases that we know of in the UK currently.

Tom, is it possible that there are some in the UK that we don't know about?

So over the last few weeks, we have seen a few report cases in poultry and wild birds.

H5N1 is back this winter compared to last year, where it was very quiet.

It is possible that there could be some cases either detected or undetected in the next few weeks as people go in to cull these birds.

The asymptomatic and the symptomatic cases in the UK previously have almost exclusively been amongst poultry cullers.

People who've come into direct contact with infected birds.

Exactly, yep.

And what can we say about how it made that jump from birds into cattle and how close it is to making the jump to human to human spread?

Yeah, so as far as we understand, there was only ever one successful jump from birds into cattle.

This isn't a virus that's jumping multiple times.

There are different barriers between different species.

It turns out for avian viruses, there's quite a large barrier for getting into humans, but by allowing it to kind of

train in these intermediate species, we're giving it a lot of opportunities to get the right combinations of mutations it needs to eventually transmit efficiently from human to human.

Speaking of mutations, so that's kind of changes in the virus that will allow it to gain access to human cells better than it can at the moment.

But there have been some headlines around a science paper that was published just this week saying that just one mutation could make H5N1 bird flu a threat to humans.

That was a headline in the Los Angeles Times.

How close are we in terms of the structure of that virus and it being a threat to humans, Tom?

So we understand a lot of the types of mutations that the virus would need to basically cause a pandemic.

Absolutely, that mutation described in that paper is one of the types of mutations that would have to be gotten that allow this virus to attach better to receptors that are abundant in the human upper respiratory tract, so kind of the nose and the throat.

There is something that's missing from these viruses, which is that these viruses are quite unstable and they're not very good at transmitting by the aerosol route.

So they tend to fall apart when they are traveling in droplets, which they would need to do to transmit efficiently human to human.

However, there are a number of mutations that are understood that the virus could gain to stabilise itself and then become more efficiently transmitted by the airborne route.

We haven't seen much evidence of that, but you could see that there are certain mammalian species where the virus is transmitting by the airborne route that could drive those sorts of mutations.

As you've said, Melody, the situation seems to be changing, and the number of human cases has gone up.

There's one particular case of a Canadian teenager who's still very ill.

Do we know what happened there and how concerned we should be about transmission to other humans?

So they don't know how the teen was exposed.

They've closed the investigation without finding any links.

However, this teenager has been in critical condition for over a month now, which is really concerning.

And influenza does tend to hit children and older adults hardest.

That case got some particular attention for a particular reason, which was the virus had some evidence of mutations that we hadn't really seen before in circulating viruses.

These are mutations actually not identical but similar to the ones from the science article.

And kind of up until now, because we hadn't seen those mutations coming up, there was a bit of a question whether the virus was even capable of getting these mutations.

This is something that's being watched very closely, but what needs to be done in terms of preparing for a situation where this does turn pandemic and there is human to human transmission?

Certainly what we need to do above all is increase testing.

We need to know who's getting sick and what's happening when they get sick.

Is the virus changing?

Is there onward spread?

The U.S.

has worked with commercial labs to develop tests that anyone could get, but as far as I know, those haven't been rolled out yet.

The U.S.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps emphasizing that the risk to the public is low.

So, if you're not in contact with animals, you might not need to get a test, but dairy workers, poultry workers, anyone who drinks raw milk, people need to have access to that.

I think surveillance at different levels as well.

So, looking at wild animals, looking at farmed animals, looking at humans with exposure, but also trying to look in the community as well for unexplained illness or influenza that isn't necessarily seasonal.

Beyond this specific virus becoming a pandemic, what concerns you most, Melody, as you report on this issue of facing a particular virus like this?

Honestly, my greatest worry right now is the drop in public trust, especially after the start of COVID.

There are people who are less likely to take viruses seriously now, less likely to isolate and get tested.

There are new laws in the U.S.

saying that you can't close down schools in some states.

You can't institute mask mandates.

There's also a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment.

So, this lack of public trust is maybe my biggest concern looking at the next pandemic.

And, Tom, can I kind of pinny down and ask you if you think this will be the next pandemic?

I would not be surprised if it was not H5M1 that was the next flu pandemic.

In fact, I think it's maybe not the most likely candidate.

But the issue is that an H5 pandemic looks very different from, for example, a swine influenza pandemic.

I think that's maybe not a bad comparison, that an H5M1 might look more like like 2020 than 2009.

And it is sort of a matter of talking about if and which one rather than whether something will happen.

So in recorded history, flu pandemics have happened every 10 to 40 years, and it's been 15 years now since the last flu pandemic.

So not saying we're overdue, but if we had one next year, it wouldn't be a surprise to anyone, I don't think.

As Tom mentioned, we do have these cycles of pandemic viruses, but how bad it is is really a reflection reflection in large part on how we deal with it.

A virus can have terrible pandemic potential, but if we are able to prepare, it can be drastically better than if we just let it spread.

Tom, would you agree with that?

Yeah, I guess maybe the more positive spin is, so compared to a novel coronavirus, we do have a lot of tools that could be used in the event of a flu pandemic, particularly vaccines could be scaled up very quickly.

And in fact, we have some stockpiles already.

But also, we will most certainly have some effective antivirals as well that could be deployed pretty quickly.

We're creeping close to Christmas, so I'm going to leave it on that positive note.

But, Melody, Tom, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Now, to a community that has almost as many polar bears as it does people, Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of the Canadian Arctic.

A new technology dubbed Bear DAR is being put through its paces there to help people safely coexist with these magnificent and potentially dangerous predators.

It's now more than 40 years since someone was killed in a polar bear attack in Churchill.

Cyril Fredland, who's lived there all his life, told me the story when I visited the remote town.

There was a local fellow that

he was going through a burnt building that had a freezer in it, that had meat in it, and he put the meat in his pocket and there was a young bear that was rummaging through the same building.

Come upon the fellow and hit him on the head like with his paw, like he was a seal, put him down.

And people tried to push the bear off and he just stood over it guarding his meal as it were that was in 1983 the man was thomas mutinen was that the last time someone was that's the last time somebody's been killed by a bear in churchill

now when you visit the polar bear capital of the world as churchill is known there are reminders of bear safety everywhere This is the Welcome to Churchill sign.

Always be alert and aware of your surroundings, travel in groups, avoid areas with poor sight lines, stay close to vehicles, never go beyond a polar bear alert warning sign, never approach or feed a bear for any reason, and don't walk at night after 10pm.

And there's a whole polar bear alert line as well, which I now have on speed dial.

If you spot a polar bear and call that alert line phone number, you'll reach a team who, as well as responding to bear sightings, also patrol the town daily.

I'm Ian Van Nest, I'm the Sergeant Conservation Officer here, and I'm also the manager for the Polar Bear Alert Programme.

What does a typical day look like?

Just like this, nice blustery weather, cold and basically I'm just trying to get the bears to move around town not through town.

So we're heading to Cape Mary here.

I'm here in November at the height of polar bear season.

The Hudson Bay that the town is perched on the western edge of starts to freeze up at this time of year and bears gather in this area waiting for the sea ice so they can head out and hunt seals.

It's a a busy time of year for Ian and the team.

And as the climate warms up here, the challenge of living alongside polar bears is getting more complicated.

Bears spend more time on shore, closer to people, while they wait for the big freeze.

Two nights ago, there was

we're coming up to the cabin here.

I caught one of the bears trying to get in.

Oh, really?

It's hungry.

All bears are hungry right now.

Yeah.

They're waiting for sea lining.

But this is the

cabin here.

The bear was up on this deck here.

It was testing the door.

What did you do?

So at that point you haze them, right?

You use your vehicle, horns, cracker shells, and you chase them in a desirable direction, which in this case would be away from town.

While rangers keep bears out of town, conservation scientists head to this area every year to monitor the western Hudson Bay polar bears.

We're tagging along on the sub-Arctic tundra, a few miles from Churchill, with a team from the organisation Polar Bears International.

We are on the tundra buggy.

It's like a huge vehicle and happily it has a stove which is really really warm because it's about minus 15 with a wind chill of minus 28 today according to the forecast.

Not long into our trip a bear approaches our buggy to investigate and we stop.

I head out into the cold to a viewing platform at the back of the vehicle at a height that's safely out of reach of curious polar bears and with Jeff York from from Polar Bears International.

There's a polar bear under our tundra boogie right now.

He's very curious about us.

My heart's really beating.

It looks like it might be a bear that we haven't seen this year and possibly a bear that's never seen this kind of human activity.

He's really...

oh whoa, so paws up on the side of the tundra boogie.

They do that.

I mean they're intensely curious about anything new in their environment.

They want to check it out.

And there's a lot of sniffing but licking as well.

So polar bears use all of their senses when they're trying to understand the world around them.

Something new.

They're going to look at it, they're going to listen, they're going to smell, but they're also going to potentially taste it.

Polar bears have black tongues.

I didn't realize that.

Black tongues and black skin.

And what we think happened is they evolved from a common ancestor with their brown bear cousins.

So all that pigment had to go somewhere, and it went to the skin.

As well as the bears, we're here to see a new experimental AI-powered bear detection system that the team is testing.

It's set up on a structure called the Tundra Tundra Buggy Lodge.

When I think of the word lodge I picture a large wooden building.

This is kind of more like a Mad Max affair of a series of train carriages on huge wheels.

It is.

It's meant to be mobile, it's meant to come apart so they can transport it back to town.

So there's a long pole poking up and this is beardar, is it?

That's beardar and we're taking advantage of this structure.

Bears are common here.

We just saw one a minute ago walk by and so it's a great place for us to test this technology to see if it'll be useful in both detecting things around a community or camp, but also identifying what they are.

How does it work?

So this is a radar system.

It's a stationary radar.

If you look up there, you'll see kind of little square panels towards the top.

They look like little iPads.

And they're just scanning 360 around the lodge.

But it also has, of course, artificial intelligence.

And so that's what we've been doing here is trying to actually teach it.

what a polar bear is.

Why is something like this and all of these systems important for the protection and conservation of the bears as well as protecting people from bears?

A big driver for all of this is around the Arctic.

Bears are spending more time onshore for longer periods of time and we're trying to get ahead of that to make sure people and communities are prepared and we can keep bears and people safe.

We're just driving along the road just outside of Churchill by the bay and in these rocks there's a polar bear just over here.

You can see now why you do not go in these rocks.

There are just so many places where these bears can just emerge from and hide.

And he's completely silent.

Churchill prides itself on setting an example of how people can coexist with polar bears.

Bear safety and awareness is part of everyday life for people who live here.

Sure they look cuddly but at the same time like you said they're dangerous.

T is a student at Churchill's school and at just 13 years old she already has some polar bear coexistence wisdom to share.

If there's a bear like 30 centimeters close to you, this is where you do.

Put your hand in the fist and then just like punch it in the nose because polar bears have like sensitive noses.

Yeah, and so they'll just like run away because.

Have you ever had to test that out?

No, but one of my older friends, his mom and his sister along with him were walking to school and the bear came up this close.

Really?

So his mom grabbed his backpack and then she whacked the backpack into the polar bear's nose and it just like ran away.

That's impressive.

I don't want to be 30 centimetres from a polar bear.

I've got it.

That's definitely too close.

I've learned enough during my time in Churchill, during my short time in Churchill, that 30 centimetres is way too close.

Thank you to the wonderful people of Churchill who spoke to me during our trip.

And that was actually a sneak preview of a documentary we made about this remarkable place, its polar bears and its people.

It's called Where the Polar Bears Wait, so do look out for it on BBC iPlayer next week.

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Now, some of us might be dreaming of flying away to warmer climes in these chilly times, but for many animals, that dream is a biological reality.

As a study published in a Royal Society Journal this week tracked the epic 13,000 kilometre journey of one humpback whale, migration expert Lucy Hawks felt inspired to share her insights into just how the most adventurous travellers of the animal kingdom go so far.

I ran the London Marathon once, that's 42 kilometres.

It pushed me to the limit of my endurance.

But since then, I have tracked an Arctic tern, which is a small white and frankly furious seabird about the size of a pack of sandwiches, flying 10 times further than that in a day.

And it did that every day for 40 days.

You might hear of the occasional human being running an ultra-marathon or across a country, but millions of animals are doing this all the time.

I'm a scientist who's fascinated by how the bodies of migrating species have evolved to be adapted to manage these mammoth journeys and what that can teach us.

You might be surprised quite how many different types of animals migrate.

Yes, there are the classics, wildebeest, whales, sea turtles and birds, but we're also talking about some of the smallest animals on Earth, tiny ocean plankton and even insects like mosquitoes and dragonflies.

While 40 tonne humpback whales can make annual migrations of 13,000 kilometres, trillions of different insects migrate over the southern UK every year to warmer climes for the winter.

But it's birds who are the champions.

They migrate further, faster and higher than any other group of animals on Earth.

A wandering albatross, for example, can clock up eight and a half million kilometres over the course of their life.

To manage this, birds have to carry lots of fuel, and they prefer to burn fat rather than sugar, like humans mostly do.

Fat provides about seven times more energy on a mass-specific basis.

And so before migration, birds can eat up to five times more food per day.

Good luck trying that at Christmas, by the way.

They become morbidly obese, with up to 55% of their body as fat stores ready for their journey ahead.

Some pre-migratory birds, like bartel Godwits, can get so fat that they get blown over by the wind and struggle to get up again, which I'm sure is how many of us are going to feel after Christmas dinner this year.

Birds also have specially adapted lungs accompanied by a system of accessory air sacs which function quite unlike the mammal lung and much more like a didgeridoo.

Every time they breathe in and out they get a fresh supply of air across the gas exchange surface, meaning they can get at least twice as much oxygen in per unit of time as as any mammal or say a scientist with a running hobby.

They can also build muscle with absolutely no training whatsoever and even captive birds kept in cages can increase their muscle mass by nearly 20% without flying a single flap which I'm sure is what many of us wish we could do after signing up for a new gym membership in January.

But probably the most impressive adaptation that birds have for migration are mechanisms to cope with cellular and muscle damage.

This includes something called reactive oxygen species, or ROS.

Damage caused by ROS is why I feel tired or sore if I run too much or too hard.

Now, you might have been told that your super healthy smoothie is rich in something called antioxidants, and these are the compounds we get from our diet that we can use to fight against ROS.

But birds don't generally get to have smoothies, and it turns out they don't need them anyway, because, unlike us, they can produce their own antioxidants.

Understanding more about birds' capacity to produce antioxidants won't just be a key to helping people to run for faster and for longer, but as ROS has a major role in many of the most significant diseases in humans, it could actually help us in the treatment of diseases like Parkinson's, cancer, autoimmune disease and metabolic disorders.

So maybe the next time you spot a duck in a pond, which by the way can fly up to 2,400 kilometres during its migration, you'll be able to imagine how amazing migratory animals like these can not only make our lives more interesting and beautiful, but actually better.

Thank you, Lucy Hawks from the University of Exeter, who has made me feel very lazy indeed.

Now to the absurd logistical challenge of putting antimatter on a lorry.

That's what scientists at CERN are attempting, to transport this volatile substance that holds the secrets of our universe outside the lab for the first time.

So how do you move antimatter?

Lizzie Gibney, a senior physics reporter at Nature, joins me.

Hi, Lizzie.

Hello.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you very much for interrupting your holiday to talk all things antimatter.

Can I start very broadly with what is antimatter?

So antimatter is kind of like matter, but in a mirror image world.

And the thing about antimatter is that when it encounters matter, it annihilates.

And that is what makes it so volatile and difficult to handle.

Why are we interested in antimatter, studying antimatter?

We don't really understand why there's so little of it and so much matter.

We live in a world of matter.

Matter is what everything is made of around us.

But according to physicists' theories, it should be that they were both produced in equal amounts at the beginning of time at the Big Bang.

But if that had happened, antimatter and matter would have annihilated and there'd be nothing left.

Of course, there's lots left.

As far as we can tell, they are basically equivalent.

So what scientists at CERN are trying to figure out is, is there some difference between the two that would explain why anything exists at all?

So in looking at the differences between antimatter and matter and that means studying antimatter up close hence moving it why exactly is it being moved?

There's two different experiments trying to do this.

Now CERN is the only place in the world who makes antimatter in significant quantities and that environment is full of magnetic fields and that means that any studies you do have got a lot of noise involved.

So if you want to study the differences between matter and antimatter at high precision you need to get rid of as much noise as possible.

That means taking them away from the source where they're produced.

The other experiment wants to take them to something else, another substance, which decays extremely quickly.

It wants to study the structure of certain nuclei that decay very, very quickly.

So again, you want to take the antimatter to

those nuclei.

I hear it's being moved by LORI, which sounds like a logistical nightmare.

How are they doing it?

It can't touch anything, right?

If the antimatter touches absolutely anything, it annihilates straight away.

Your experiment is gone.

So they need to pin it in place with very strong magnetic fields so you have like a bottle they call it magnetic bottle so it's entirely made of magnets and these are super cooled magnets it also needs to be very very cold it needs to be about four degrees above absolute zero and you need an extremely high vacuum so People at CERN have been working on this feat for decades actually now, are studying antimatter, but that's in a big lab that's using enormous magnets, that's everything connected to the mains.

What they need to do now is make it all portable and make it able to withstand you know the bumps of traveling yeah along the road and is that basically about all of those things being combined in a canister that can go on the back of a lorry and be left alone for for many hours at the moment first of all they're just going to travel across the cern site so they're literally going maybe like a kilometer down the road as a first test but eventually the idea is that this would um open up to any lab at least around europe we think to be able to study antimatter in this way.

So you could take it on the road and there's a plan to, in the coming, you know, few years, take it maybe 700 kilometers away to university in Dusseldorf.

That's the first stop.

And then we'll see beyond that.

Do we know who's driving?

Do you know?

That is a really good question.

I would say they've got some great technical staff at CERN.

I imagine it's one of them behind the wheel of the lorry.

The two experiments are quite different because one is just taking a few protons.

That's the one which is studying them in detail.

The other one is trying to transport 1 billion antiprotons.

And that's going to be a 10-ton truck.

So that's a little bit bigger.

There's a kind of one-ton lorry and there's a 10-ton lorry.

Wow, for the big antimatter road trip.

And now I need to ask you about how risky this is.

So in Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons, terrorists stole a quarter of a gram of antimatter from CERN to try to obliterate the Vatican.

That was fiction, by the way.

Is there a danger?

Even the experiment that's transporting 1 billion antiprotons, that's about two trillionths, I think, if I remember rightly, of a gram.

So even if all of that went kaboom at the same time, the energy is about the equivalent of if a pencil drops off the table and hits the floor, that kind of impact energy.

Are you saying that angels and demons was not a scientifically accurate plot?

Well, if we had a quarter of a gram, that would be different.

That would be a lot.

But this stuff is so hard to make.

It's probably the most expensive substance in the world.

It costs many trillions of dollars per gram.

So not even CERN makes a quarter of a gram.

We're talking about teeny tiny amounts.

Are you going to try and get along on the Antimetta road trip?

I would absolutely love to be there.

Although, with so many of these things, it sounds incredible.

And when you're actually there, it's going to be a lot of paperwork and

walking very, very slowly behind a lorry.

So we'll see.

Remarkably boring.

But for now, Lizzie, thank you so much for joining us and for interrupting your holiday.

No problem at all.

Thanks very much.

That's all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science, presented by me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Ella Hubber and Jerry Holt.

Technical production was by Searle Whitney.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

And to discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Next week, with the help of some excellent expert guests, we will be summing up the most significant science of 2024, all in one 30-minute programme.

So please do join me then.

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