Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
For 40 years, they’ve held the front line in Florida’s fight against mosquito-borne diseases. And it turns out that the chickens standing sentinel in cities, marshes, woodlands and residential backyards are clucking good at their job.
Last year, chickens in 268 coops in over a third of Florida’s counties provided scientists weekly blood samples that revealed whether the birds had been bitten by mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus or the Eastern equine encephalitis or St. Louis encephalitis viruses.
If a chicken’s blood tests positive for antibodies to one of those viruses, authorities know that the pathogen is circulating. And if enough birds have the antibodies, state officials can ratchet up mosquito-killing measures such as pesticide spraying to help halt disease spread.
The sentinel chicken surveillance programs are “a really good way of monitoring” for certain virus activity, says Thomas Unnasch, a biologist who studies vector-borne diseases at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The birds “are sampling literally hundreds or thousands of mosquitoes every day,” he says. (The chickens can’t keep tabs on dengue or Zika; the mosquitoes carrying those viruses prefer to bite people rather than birds.)
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