The Marine Mammal Center, which is the largest marine animal hospital in the world, is studying whether developed bird flu vaccines are effective on vulnerable seals and seal lions.
The bird flu, also referred to as H5N1, continues its global domination and world spread. Our incompetent federal government is scrambling to get ahead of an increasingly likely epidemic — or pandemic — caused by the highly contagious pathogen.
(A reluctant $1 billion funding to the USDA in early February helped quell the domestic spread among livestock and keep high-risk workers safe. Trump’s downsizing and sidelining of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy means it remains understaffed. Our incumbent Secretary of Health and Human Services has doubled down on their vaccine hesitancy and has actively defunded programs responsible for creating life-saving inoculations against a novel, human-to-human contagious strain of H5N1. We’re … just … so screwed.)
H5N1 is incredibly, increasingly species agnostic. The virus has been recorded in nearly 500 avian species and, concerning us humans, about 70 mammalian species. Marine mammals are particularly susceptible to cross-species infections. Pinnipeds, the taxonomic classification that includes all modern-day seals and sea lions, are dying in the tens of thousands; their mortality rate is unusually high among mammals at 96%; the mortality rate in dairy cows infected with H5N1 is just 2%; more than 22 sea otter carcases in Japan have tested positive for bird flu, but specific infection and mortality rates are unknown.
An entire population of threatened or endangered pinnipeds could be decimated (or even wiped out) by a bird flu outbreak. It’s a hypoethical situation; the scientists at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito are all too aware that it could happen, which is why they’re spearheading the development of a new bird flu vaccine.
The wildlife hospital and rehabilitation center recently shared its participation in a bird flu-specific vaccine. The news update shared on September 9th details how a vaccine for seals and seal lions has been in development since July, with northern elephant seal patients used as a surrogate species — “a species that is used to represent another species in conservation science” — due to their close genetic relation to other species.
Among the species sharing similar makeups is the Hawaiian monk seal, the world’s rarest seal species, with just 1,600 examples known to science, and the species of most concern. Simple maths using current mortality rates suggests a single bird flu outbreak among the vulnerable island population of seals could leave only 64 animals left on the planet — an extinction-level event for the species, for all intents and purposes.
The Center began the trial with six elephant seal patients, each selected for the study based on everything from their health to rehabilitation paths. All participants were rescued due to severe malnutrition and were improving well in care.
The six seals were then split into two equal groups: a control group and a vaccinated group, each cohort supervised under veterinary care. The initial trio of seals received a vaccine series with two doses separated by 21 days; the second trio was injected with a simple saline solution as a means to create a static baseline.
Alas, there are only a handful of developed species-specific bird flu vaccines. None has been catered to marine mammals. Cows are the most closely related species to seals that have a developed H5N1 vaccine. Under a conditional license to use the vaccine, the Center is using bird flu vaccines originally developed for cattle to see if they are efficacious when administered to seals and seal lions.
Participating scientists are seeing promising results, though more time is needed to establish any concrete findings. The next immediate step is to draw blood from the vaccinated seals and test it against active bird flu viruses. If the vaccine doses were effective in boosting the injected seal’s immune system against H5N1, researchers will be able to observe virus-specific antibodies attacking the pathogens, reducing overall viral load; conversely, blood drawn from an animal in the control group and treated identically would show increased vulnerability to bird flu.
The success of this H5N1 trial would be a massive win for wildlife conservation, serving as a lifeline for the critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal and other seal and seal lion species.
“This is a huge opportunity to develop a preventative tool that could protect an entire population from extinction,” said Dr. Dominic Travis, the Center’s Chief Programs Officer, in the news update.
Here’s hoping our federal government materializes a similar urgency in protecting the human species against one of the deadliest flu types known to science.
Feature Image: Dr. Whitaker and Sarah Pattison, RVT, Director of Hospital Operations, collect a blood sample from an elephant seal. (Photo by Bill Hunnewell at The Marine Mammal Center)
