Trivia Junction

A Compendium of trivia I find interesting
...for the curious

One flu over the pigeon's nest

By reputation and appearance, your common, everyday scruffy-looking pigeon would seem to be a likely culprit for carrying bird flu. But while they may be many things – most of them uncomplimentary – urban pigeons don't appear to be significant flu carriers.

Tests show that while pigeons can contract the flu, it seems to happen only after they have been exposed to extraordinarily high doses. In one experiment, for example, researchers squirted liquid drops of the H5N1 avian flu virus into pigeons' mouths. The doses were 100 to 1,000 times more concentrated than the amount birds might encounter in the wild.

“We couldn't infect the pigeons,” said David Swayne of the USDA's Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory. “So that's good news.”

To be sure, there are cases of pigeons getting bird flu and dying, but they are rare. In most cases, the birds recover quickly, with only a day or two when they are infectious enough to transmit the disease to other birds or, in theory, people.

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