Königsweg 67
14163 Berlin
+49 30 838 56034
epi@vetmed.fu-berlin.de
Background :
One Health topics such as transmission of zoonotic agents of domestic/wild birds and environmental residue problems, food and feed safety become increasingly important to modern society in the post pandemic times. We performed phylodynamic-spatio-temporal analysis of A/H5N1 epizootic in cats in Poland in Spring-Summer 2023.
Data & Methods :
Data and methods triangulation were applied based on: 1) 30 (positive) and 27 (negative) cases from WOAH reference lab, 2) suspected 87 cases submitted by animal owners (participatory epidemiology), 3) daily time series of i) Google queries for Avian Influenza (AI), cats disease and cats deaths, as well as ii) mentions of cat/cats and AI in social and traditional media. 4) 19 RNA sentences of viruses. Wildbirds abundance and distance to water reservoirs and trajectories of birds' migratory paths were used as covariates. We compared the chain and hierarchical structure of clusters of various types of data in multidimensional space.
Results:
1.Positive cases form chains structure both on bird migration paths and close to high abundance of nesting sites of waterbirds (verified by comparison of Average Nearest Neighbour distance and betweenness clustering of positive case vs both controls);2.The A/H5N1 was already probably circulating in cats in the second half of May in regions bordering with Ukraine (a month before first confirmed case);3.There are at least 2 (eastern and western Poland)
separate introductions of viruses (according to k-mean and DBScan).
Conclusions :
We recommend active monitoring (serology) of water birds (these overwintering for some reasons), rodents and cats in Pomerania and selected sites in Western Poland (as maybe some low viral pressure were still there the latest in July). Common outbreak investigation of veterinary and sanitary inspection revealed multiple gaps in emerging new zoonotic threats. Thus, use of unconventional data and infodemic management should be incorporated into surveilance/risk assessment schema, because we might handle similar problems in the next few years in Europe.