Rapid on-farm pathogen testing firm Alveo Technologies has teamed up with wildfowl surveillance specialist AgriNerds to create an early warning system for avian flu it claims could dramatically improve poultry farmers’ ability to detect and contain outbreaks before they escalate.
The partnership combines AgriNerds’ Waterfowl Alert Network—which uses radar, satellite imagery, telemetry (radio tags to track wild birds), and other data to predict where infection risk is highest from wild birds—with Alveo’s portable molecular diagnostics platform, which can detect avian flu in 45 minutes.
The aim is to find a middle ground between impractical, round-the-clock “super-surveillance” and waiting for birds to show symptoms before testing and then waiting another two to three days for PCR lab results—by which point the virus may already have spread within and beyond the farm.
Instead, producers could step up testing when AgriNerds’ model signals that migratory bird activity or other factors have increased the likelihood of infection, Alveo president Erik Tyrrell-Knott told AgFunderNews.
Data generated by Alveo’s tests—which are already on the market in several countries and on track to secure USDA approval later this year—can in turn feed back into AgriNerds’ models and potentially make subsequent risk predictions more precise.
“Right now, if egg production goes down, if the birds appear lethargic, or the mortality rate goes up, farmers have a decision to make,” said Tyrrell-Knott. “It might be bird flu. It might be something else. Are you going to incur a lot of expense and take all these [extra] biosecurity measures flying blind, or are you going to wait days [for lab test results] and it’s business as usual [in the meantime]?
“We’ve got two 21st century technologies combining to provide informed, intelligent, data-driven surveillance guidance, which is something that is totally missing in the current landscape.”
Grading risk for dynamic surveillance
Waterfowl are a major reservoir of bird flu, creating a risk when infected birds fly over or roost near poultry farms. AgriNerds combines multiple data sources to predict waterfowl abundance close to individual poultry facilities and classifies risk as low, moderate, or high.
While seasonal migration patterns are broadly predictable, the risk surrounding individual farms can vary significantly from one year to the next as weather, crops, water availability and habitat change, said AgriNerds founder Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor at the UC Davis Weill school of veterinary medicine.
Generally, he said, wild birds are looking for a food source and a water source. And both can be subject to change, for example should a nearby farmer plant new or different crops, or should heavy rain create an environment that might attract waterfowl.
The network now makes daily predictions across the country relative to 160,000+ commercial poultry facilities, said Pitesky, who says AgriNerds’ data is now used by 1,500+ farms across 25 states. “The farm doesn’t change location, but the risk does change.”
Users could, for example, choose only to receive alerts when a farm enters the highest-risk category. “The vet wakes up and is notified in real time: You’ve got a red day today.”
What does earlier detection actually change?
But what is the value of early detection if infected flocks must ultimately be destroyed?
For infected birds, says Tyrrell-Knott, there’s not much you can do. But if you catch bird flu early, you can restrict movements of employees, feed and waste trucks, and take other measures aimed at limiting farm-to-farm transmission. Farms can also modify ventilation practices designed to limit the dispersal of potentially contaminated material.
This is particularly important because infection does not only move from wild birds into poultry operations but in about 30% of cases is spread from farm to farm through people, vehicles, equipment or airborne material, he claimed.
Pitesky said Alveo’s results could also add much more granular disease data to AgriNerds’ risk model. Rather than relying on bird flu detections reported at county level, it could potentially incorporate geotagged test results from individual farms and combine these with wind direction and other environmental information.
“If you have an on-farm test that comes back positive, we can understand where feather dander might be traveling from infected facilities and warn farms that are downwind.”
Longer term, more rapid testing combined with more detailed intelligence on bird movements could reduce the overall number of birds that have to be culled in a large facility if early detection means the virus can be contained within one barn, said Tyrrell-Knott.
“We believe in future with our accuracy, our sensitivity, the rapidity and trustworthiness of our results, that you could start to partially depopulate some of these complexes when you’ve got 13 barns with two million birds on a complex, instead of having to cull all the birds.”
Testing asymptomatic flocks
Alveo’s platform uses molecular amplification rather than the lateral-flow technology used in rapid strip tests, which are not hugely reliable, claimed Tyrrell-Knott.
“It’s rapid, but 30-40% of the time they miss the virus, so you get a false negative.”
Alveo, by contrast, is deploying “basically the same molecular amplification technology [used in a laboratory],” said Tyrrell-Knott. “But we’ve reduced it to the size of a cell phone and made it rugged, easy to use and affordable.”
The tech can distinguish between H5 and H7 subtypes of avian influenza at 96-99% accuracy, approaching what you’d get from PCR tests in a lab, results from which can take 2-3 days to arrive, he claimed.
In the US, the Alveo test currently being evaluated uses oropharyngeal swabs, while outside the US Alveo also uses cloacal swabs from the birds’ rear end, says the firm.
Building an early-warning network
The broader opportunity is to shift bird flu management further upstream, from responding to outbreaks after they occur toward identifying when farms are exposed to unusually high external risk and testing accordingly, said Pitesky.
“In this way, agriculture can move past reactive disease management to adopt a proactive, risk-informed approach.”
Tyrrell-Knott added: “We’ve been approved for experimental use by the USDA and state vets and we believe we’re on track for approval in Q4 of this year as the first on farm molecular bird flu test in the US. We’re not allowed to pre-sell but we spoke at a big poultry conference in Texas a few weeks ago and we were mobbed.”