Queensland has recorded its first suspected case of H5 bird flu, in a dead petrel found on Moreton Island, the state's Department of Primary Industries said on Friday.
Samples returned an initial positive at the Queensland government's Biosecurity Sciences Laboratory in Brisbane and have been sent to the CSIRO's Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness at Geelong for confirmation. If confirmed, Queensland becomes the fourth state with a detection, after Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales.
Queensland's chief veterinary officer, Dr Allison Crook, said the result was expected. "We have known that a H5 bird flu detection in Queensland was a matter of when, not if," she said. She asked the public to report sick or dead birds to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline on 1800 675 888.
There have been no detections in poultry in Queensland and no reports of large-scale deaths in any animals in the state. The national count stood at 17 wild-bird detections earlier in the week, all in seabirds, with the first confirmed in Western Australia on 20 June.
This is the first case in Queensland and the first anywhere north of the New South Wales coast. Every Australian detection so far has been in wild seabirds, most of them migratory, and none in a commercial flock.
That distinction is doing a lot of work. The virus has moved through wild bird populations on other continents over the past four years and reached Australia this year, and the federal agriculture department has assessed the risk to people as low. What it has not been able to do is keep the virus out, which is why the poultry industry has been on heightened biosecurity for weeks rather than on notice of a specific threat.
Confirmation from the Geelong laboratory is the next step. Until it arrives the Moreton Island case is recorded as a suspect positive. The number that matters for the industry has not moved: no commercial flock in Australia has been infected.
