The virus is out of the barn: the emergence of HPAI as a pathogen of avian and mammalian wildlife around the globe

Abstract

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has persisted as a One Health threat whose current circulation and impact are addressed in the companion Currents in One Health by Puryear and Runstadler, JAVMA, May 2024. Highly pathogenic avian influenza emerged as a by-product of agricultural practices and adapted to endemic circulation in wild bird species. Over more than 20 years, continued evolution in a complex ecology involving multiple hosts has produced a lineage that expanded globally over the last 2 years. Understanding the continued evolution and movement of HPAI relies on understanding how the virus is infecting different hosts in different contexts. This includes understanding the environmental factors and the natural ecology of viral transmission that impact host exposure and ultimately evolutionary trajectories. Particularly with the rapid host expansion, increased spillover to mammalian hosts, and novel clinical phenotypes in infected hosts, despite progress in understanding the impact of specific mutations to HPAI viruses that are associated with spillover potential, the threat to public health is poorly understood. Active research is focusing on new approaches to understanding the relationship of viral genotype to phenotype and the implementation of research and surveillance pipelines to make sense of the enormous potential for diverse HPAI viruses to emerge from wild reservoirs amid global circulation.