Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Hey, everyone. I am Dr. Mike Brasher, and I'm going to be your host on today's episode, and I am thrilled to be in studio with Kasey Messerle, our conservation science assistant. You remember Kasey from a previous episode. Kasey, great to have you back.

Kayci Messerly: Nice to be back.

Mike Brasher: And we are joined in studio by our guest from nearby St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Dr. Lisa Kircher, the Director of Laboratory Operations for Dr. Richard Webby's lab, or his influenza research group. Lisa, it's great to have you here, too.

Lisa Kircher: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Mike Brasher: So we've had Dr. Webby on previously to talk about avian influenza and that's going to be the topic of this discussion today. I will encourage folks to try to watch this episode on our YouTube channel. This is going to be sort of a visual aid heavy episode where we actually ran into Dr. Kircher at a recent meeting in Alabama, where you were giving a presentation, kind of giving the Mississippi Flyway Council tech section an update on your work in this space. And as Casey and I were watching your presentation, I think we were both like, this would be a great kind of performance, even so, for our Ducks Unlimited podcast, because there's a lot of great information that you're going to bring to us, and it will complement a lot of the other work and a lot of the other episodes that we've had on before. We're recording this, and April, late April 2025, and we're probably now, what, three years into this, into the outbreak here in North America. So, we've learned a few things along the way, and learned a lot along the way, and a number of things have changed, and so we're here to give you the latest update on it. I think, Lisa, the first thing we'll do is have you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, just a brief background, but then we want to get on the other topic that a lot of people will probably ask you in terms of why is St. Jude doing any kind of research in avian influenza. But first, a little bit of background on who you are.

Lisa Kircher: I've been working at St. Jude for almost 15 years. I came in 2011 and I grew up as being trained as a classical molecular virologist. I'm a hardcore laboratorian and post 9-11, believe it or not, I was trained in containment because at that time when we had lots of bioterrorism worries, The NIH was building BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs all over the country and they were building one out where I was working in Montana. And so I was trained in high containment for several years and then got recruited to St. Jude actually in 2011 to come and manage their BSL-3 lab. So the reason I'm here now outside is because for the past 20 years, like I've told you before, I've been locked away in a containment lab. And so I've been so fortunate to get out of the containment lab now and come out into doing some field research. And for the past six years now, I have been overseeing the avian influenza surveillance program for Dr. Webby's group. The person that ran it before me did it for 30 years and he retired. And so I took over that a few years ago. And then when high path flu came to North America in 2021, like you said, we've been in it three years now, what I've tried to do is take our operation into a new direction. So we have done avian influenza surveillance for many years, started by Dr. Webster way back, almost when St. Jude started in the early 1970s. And Dr. Webster is from New Zealand and he's a bird guy and he was walking around in their late 70s, watching birds die. And he thought, you know, I wonder if that's influenza. And no one believed him for a long time. Everyone said, no, flu's not in the birds. Flu's in the pigs. Why would flu be in the birds? That doesn't make any sense. And so he had trouble back in the day getting his papers published. And it turned out then in about the mid-1990s, when the avian flu did jump to people in China, in Asia, Everyone said, oh, Dr. Webster, the blue flu is in the birds. Oh my. And so that is how we got started at St. Jude. He was the founder then of our WHO Collaborating Center. And now also through his grants, we are heavily funded by the NIH through work to do all kinds of influenza. But we focus on zoonotic influenza, which is disease that jumps from animals to people. And so that's how we got started in avian flu.

Mike Brasher: And so what's the connection between that avian flu and some of the other, I guess, the primary mission of St. Jude? So I can hear you explain how the discovery came to be and Dr. Webster was involved in that. but then a connection to some of the other primary mission areas of St. Jude. Is it particularly risky to children in any way? Does it intersect any of those aspects of the work that St. Jude does?

Lisa Kircher: Yes, absolutely. So, St. Jude is a hospital of children that have catastrophic diseases. Most of those, as everybody knows, focuses on cancer. They do other diseases, but most of it is cancer. And as you all know that people with cancer that are getting treatment, usually that will wipe out your immune system, any kind of treatment, whether it's chemotherapy, radiation, whatever. It wipes out your immune system, especially for children that don't have a particularly developed immune system, that can be devastating. Infection control in our hospital is one of the most important things that we can do. And so research on infectious diseases of all kinds is very big at St. Jude because you do not ever want to have a child that has a suppressed immune system get any kind of infectious disease. And so we focus on influenza, we focus a lot on bacterial pneumonia, there's lots of pathogens that St. Jude does. And so avian influenza is also very risky. So even though we are not in a situation where it jumps to people very often, it can. And as everybody's been watching in the news recently, it's very much a concern now. So it's not a big leap from regular seasonal people flu to get to avian influenza.

Mike Brasher: And then the role that y'all, or the work that y'all do informs and influences decisions and knowledge well beyond just the inner workings of St. Jude. We've talked about Dr. Webby as sort of the director of this World Health Organization Collaborative Center, I forget the other words there, but of avian influenza, the study of avian influenza. He contributes and you and others contribute, the work that you do contributes to understanding well just beyond the confines of St. Jude.

Lisa Kircher: Absolutely. So, Dr. Webby is one of the eight people in the world that convene in Geneva twice a year to determine what strain goes in the influenza vaccine for people. So that's a pretty… And the reason he's able to do that is because our lab is very big. We have almost over 30 people that work and we are constantly turning information around very quickly. So influenza, as you know, mutates rapidly all the time. And we do all sorts of work. We do a lot of surveillance, not only on birds but on swine and surveillance in people as well. We do a lot of experimental work in the lab, in the containment lab that I talked about earlier. And what that does is it turns information around. We need to know how the virus is changing and how that might affect human health. And so one of Dr. Webby's superpowers is to be able to get on the phone and tell somebody when there is a new virus like what we're going to talk about this D11. he will be able to get on the phone with whoever calls him and that can be anybody from the head of the NIH all the way up to the White House and say, what is, what does this mean? What are you seeing? And so the work we're doing in the lab is able to turn that information around and it's all very quick and very rapid.

Mike Brasher: This information and this topic is important to Ducks Unlimited and our members because many of them are waterfowl hunters. Waterfowl, we've talked on previous episodes about the role that waterfowl play in sort of moving the influenza viruses around on the landscape and across continents and so waterfowl hunters are also one of the groups of people that are, I think it's safe to say, more likely to be exposed to the virus and to birds and animals that have the virus. So there should be, and that's what Ducks Unlimited has been trying to do with our communication efforts, heightened awareness among that community about avian influenza, what its risks are, and then also importantly, what role hunters can play as being sort of out there on the front lines of individuals that are interacting with waterfowl and waterfowl habitats, what we can do to sort of reduce the likelihood of the virus further spreading into some of the more vulnerable areas of our landscape, poultry operations, whether it be commercial or backyard. And then also just awareness of maybe how our risks compare to those of other individuals. So, all of those things are kind of wrapped up in the communication effort that Ducks Unlimited has done around this topic and it's another reason why we want you here today. Your presentation that Casey and I saw in Alabama, you shared some information that was a bit more detailed than some of what we've been able to talk with Dr. Webby about before. Part of that was because you gave a presentation and we asked you to come in today You brought the presentation. There's some pretty cool animations that we're going to show. And so we're going to… That's where we're going to step through. There's also some stories in here about your interactions with waterfowl hunters and maybe waterfowl researchers. I don't know if you've done any work with waterfowl hunters yet.

Lisa Kircher: A little bit, not as much as I'd like to get into, which is why we're here today.

Mike Brasher: A lot of the folks, a lot of the researchers you worked with are waterfowl hunters, but the times that you've interacted with them have been when they're doing their research. And so, some of our listeners will recognize some of the names that you've interacted with. And so, I guess, Casey, unless you have any questions or anything, any other things here at the intro, one of the next steps will be to have Lisa kind of step through some of the portions of the presentation and we'll just sort of… chime in and interrupt you and ask questions, use that as the basis for some of our discussion.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah, I think let's jump into it. You guys have quite a treat ahead of you. Like we said at the Mississippi Flyway Conference, your presentation was a great start for entering into this conversation and really is a digestible piece of information we're excited to share with our waterfowl hunters out there.

Mike Brasher: So again, if you're not watching the video, this is certainly the time to do so, because we will be trying to reference a few things that Lisa will be showing, but you're not going to get the full effect unless you're watching on Ducks Unlimited's YouTube channel. So check that out. Join us. Hopefully you're watching from that platform. So Lisa, go ahead and take it away.

Lisa Kircher: The program that I'll describe to you is called Bird Watch, right? That is bioinformatic. It's an acronym, like everything.

Mike Brasher: It's a great one too, I might add.

Lisa Kircher: Influenza risk detection and waterfowl assessment for tracking control and health. And so this was kind of a brainchild of myself and my coworkers at St. Jude, where I had been in the field now for four or five years, including with the exception of the COVID years. And I watched the operation of surveillance that has gone on for decades. And the operation of surveillance is you go to a place and you collaborate with the waterfowl researchers that are there, and you're able to get your hands on birds and get some samples. And then those samples are sent back to the lab, and then it takes quite a bit of time to actually process those samples, determine what bird had flu, what bird did not have flu, and then to get all the way to a genetic sequence. That process can take months. And what I started thinking about was, well, this is too slow for one thing, because we are now in an environment where high-path flu has come to America. It was fine before when it was just low-path flu and we wanted to know what was out there. But we have such a different dynamic environment with high-path flu in all of these wild birds that is spilling over into all these other mammals and everything that you guys know about that. The concept is to go faster and to get information. Like I said before, our lab is set up to turn information around faster. So the design is to take what is a retrospective system and turn it more into a prospective system. So the way you do that is you get somebody like me with a bunch of crazy ideas and you get a camper and put a bunch of lab equipment in it and you take it to the site. get the sample, mail it back to the lab, do all the work in the lab. We have the technology to actually analyze the sample in the field on site. And so it's really about shifting the burden away from the laboratory to more about in the field. And this has resulted in very high turnaround of results. So in the two or three years I've been doing it, it's not been very long really. When I've been on site with the right equipment, we will work with the duck banders and the waterfowl researchers, and they help us catch a lot of birds, and we will swab the birds. And in 24 hours, I can tell them how many are positive for flu. I can do a PCR test right in the mobile lab and tell them what is positive. That has a lot of implications.

Mike Brasher: You can't do all the genetic analysis that quick, can you? To determine, or can you? You're going to get into that? We'll get into that. Yes, you can actually. That's one of the cooler things about this. We've talked in previous episodes about we're trying to look for for mutations that you all, your area of expertise, your colleagues know are associated with greater transmissibility or different ways of transmission and maybe different virulence. Those are the things that you're always looking for. Whenever there's an update or a new development, one of the first things we ask Dr. Webby is, is there evidence of significant change that would make it more risky or more easily transmissible to humans? And he's like, no, we're still not seeing those genes yet. So you're able to look for those nearly real time.

Lisa Kircher: In nearly real time, correct. So we're building that. So right now I have the capability to tell you if it's positive or negative for flu and I can tell you if it's high path or not. So we can do that right away. I'm going to be this year when I go out into the field, I am bringing the system with me to start prototyping the actual sequencing. So there's technology out there where they make an actual genetic sequencer that's about the size of a candy bar and you can put your sample in it and there's a lot of steps in between and I have people in the lab helping me work this out. But you can then, that would take another day probably, but you can know the actual subtype of the virus and you'll know if there's any mutations in it. Again, that has a lot of implications because knowing the answer to that in days rather than months can affect decision-making down the road. And so there's still a lot of unknowns around that, but to me, I feel like if we just start getting information faster, it can help because we never know. Everybody always wants to know, when is the next pandemic? We have no idea how to predict that. If you knew when that was, we could do a few things, right? Exactly. And I could stop. But we don't know that. But if we found viruses out there and we were able to say this particular one has a mutation in it that is more adaptive to mammals, this particular one has mutation in it that is resistant to antivirals that you could give somebody, That would put everybody on high alert and it would enable, at least in that community, to be able to up their biosecurity and make some decisions that are more risk-based and not just reactionary. Most of the decisions made around flu are reactionary after something has already happened. And that's fine and it's necessary, but I really strongly believe that you can change it so that you don't always have to make a reactionary decision. You don't have to have the USDA, which are great people, come in and clean up a bunch of dead birds. You can figure out what's going on before a tragedy happens and maybe make some better risk calculations. That's the point.

Kayci Messerly: Okay, so I know we talked a little bit about why St. Jude is involved in this, but where is that intersection between St. Jude, influenza, and waterfowl?

Lisa Kircher: Okay, that goes back to Dr. Webster. Like I said, he was the one that really realized a long time ago that Waterfowl were the central reservoir for influenza and he just happened to be an infectious disease researcher at St. Jude. And then he got all the money. So that's really, that's as short of a story as you can make it. And so that is why we are such a prominent influenza lab at St. Jude. So he has continued to do that research to this day. He is now a retired emeritus professor, but he continues to be involved in what goes on and he's very concerned about the situation in North America. So this slide is just to remember that waterfowl is where it all begins. And so that's important for your community. It is a zoonotic disease, which means that's what we call our wheel of flu. So that there's lots more species on there that are affected, but that's a simplifies version of how From the waterfowl, this can jump to many kinds of species, including mammals. And then it's also important to remember from a public health standpoint that in the past, all of the influenza pandemics have had an avian genetic component. So I'm going to get into that a little more when we talk about reassortment. But this slide is just to then remember about the two forms of avian influenza. Wild birds can carry both low pathogenic and high pathogenic avian influenza, and generally they seem to be okay carrying both kinds around until recently, until this new clade 2344 came about that does kill a larger proportion of wild birds than it used to. And then it's also important to remember that the reason we have so much trouble economically with our chickens and our egg prices and our cows is because highly pathogenic flu is 100% fatal to domestic birds. And so that's just a very simplified way to show that on this slide. And so that becomes a very important calculation for how our food supply is working in the country. Here is just a really messy picture of how complicated wild bird movement is and how it's everywhere in the globe. And when birds move, the virus moves. And so this is from a publication that our collaborators in Hong Kong did, where they had figured out how this new clade 2344B, where it started. It started in the Middle East region of the world. It quickly spread throughout Asia and Europe, and then it crossed the oceans and came to North America in 2021. So if you look at the picture on the right, it's this wavy bunch of colors, and that is depicting the way over time the clades have changed for H5N1. For instance, you see now the pink at the very far right is 2344B and that is basically the dominant genotype that is circling the globe still to this day. We call it 2344B and that's because we have no other imaginative way to name anything. It gets to be very complicated and lots of letters and numbers but that's where we end up. So you just memorize what that is and that's what it is. The picture on the bottom shows the difference in the subtype that has overtaken as well. We used to have different kinds of H5s, H5N2, H5N8, they still circulate but the dominant form is H5N1 now and it is clade 2344B and so that's what those wavy color pictures are meant to show you is how dominant that is and how it's unusual for this particular time period in how long we've studied influenza or how much that's gone on.

Mike Brasher: So if people hear a reference to 2344B, that's, it's a, what did you say it was? It's an H5N1. So it is H5N1, that's the, and is that synonymous, are all H5N1 going to be a high path avian influenza? It's safe to say that as well.

Lisa Kircher: There are 16 kinds of H's. So H stands for hemagglutinin, which is the protein that's on the outside of the virus. And there are actually in the bird world, there are 16 kinds of that. You can go anywhere from H1 to H16. High-path is very much restricted to H5 and some H7 and so that makes it easy to remember. So thank heaven there aren't 16 kinds of high-path flu. There's 14 other low-path kinds of flu but that's how we designate it.

Mike Brasher: And so, am I also remembering correctly that historically high-path avian influenza was pretty rare in wild birds? It mostly occurred in commercial facilities, but then this occurrence, certainly the widespread occurrence of it in wild birds is a relatively new thing. Is that right? Correct.

Lisa Kircher: I can't tell you what the prevalence was over time globally. We were just not that good at measuring it. But wild birds have circulated high-path flu for as long as we've been able to measure it. The thing that's different about this one, and then anytime a wild bird high-path flu spills over into any kind of domestic situation, whether that's a commercial poultry farm or a backyard poultry farm, that's how you know there was high-path flu in the wild birds because now all the chickens are dying or dead. And so that has been… Until recently, pretty restricted to, at least in the 90s, this was restricted to Asian countries and some in Europe. But you can see from this, that messy picture of the globe with all the colors just going everywhere, that's all the birds with 2344B. That's an unusual amount, and we have not seen that before.

Kayci Messerly: And so that previous spread that you were seeing was associated with a different clade of high path originally and now it's changed to this new dominant strain that you keep talking about.

Lisa Kircher: Correct. When it emerged in Asia in the mid 90s, that was sort of the OG, I guess you would call it. It was the OG H5N1 and everybody in the flu world panicked about it, but the rest of the world didn't really panic about it. There was, oh, that just happened in China. But we all knew that it was just a matter of time because if you understand how rapidly the virus evolves you knew it was going to spread and so it's just taken this particular amount of time in history for it to evolve to such a point where it has become extremely efficient in replicating in wild birds and wild birds carry it all over the globe now and that's why we have so much more domestic spillover.

Mike Brasher: I think what I want to do right now, we've had a great introduction to the topic. We've recapped and revisited some of what we've talked about before. I want to take a break, and then whenever we come back, I want to talk about some of the newer bits of information, at least newer to our audience, I think, and digging in a bit deeper on this concept of reassortment. how we talk about, why we talk about the importance of understanding the ability for it to mutate and some of the other reasons why we talk about it. It's really important to stay aware of the presence of this virus in other, in non-birds, in mammals and such. So we've got more of that information coming up, so stay with us, folks. We'll be right back. Hey everyone, welcome back. We are here with Dr. Lisa Kircher of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. When we left off, we were talking about how the next and most exciting thing we're going to talk about here on this episode is this concept of reassortment. You've got some neat graphics to show and help demonstrate this concept. this concept or this, what do you call it, activity, this thing that happens. And so take us through these slides, explain what's going on here and why it's so important, we think, to kind of help people understand a little more about this.

Lisa Kircher: Sure. Okay, so I'll just get ready for Virology 101. This is fascinating and I can't understand why everybody doesn't think this is the most fascinating thing in the world. I do. They will after this episode.

Mike Brasher: Of course, you will.

Lisa Kircher: So influenza is just the most interesting virus, of course. Most viruses exist with one piece of nucleic acid and it can be DNA or RNA. Influenza is very different. It has eight pieces of nucleic acid and that is RNA. So RNA is very different from DNA. RNA is a lot… it's the messenger part of your genetic, right? So all you need to do is translate that into protein and then you can get things happening in your cell. So influenza has eight and the reason it is able to evolve, what we've just been talking about for that whole last part about why does it change so fast and why does this… you end up with all these different evolutionary kinds of influenza. is because of this phenomenon called reassortment. So not only is each of those eight gene segments mutating because the way it replicates is not very efficient, it's pretty promiscuous actually, and then another thing that happens is two viruses can enter the same cell. So in this picture… Like two different types of viruses. Exactly. So this picture shows a yellow virus and a red virus. So let's say one of those is high-path flu, the red one, and then the yellow one is a low-path flu. You can have a high-path flu and a low-path flu enter the same cell inside a duck, right? So there's so much virus circulating around that this happens all the time.

Mike Brasher: Now, I'm going to stop you right here. Could this also be a high-path flu and the ordinary human flu in a person? Absolutely.

Lisa Kircher: It can be any of these combinations.

Mike Brasher: So, keep that in mind. Think about that instead of this being something occurring in, let's say, a duck or a cow. Think about this being a situation where a single person contracts these two viruses. Correct.

Lisa Kircher: That's why this slide has nothing on it except two pictures of viruses dome-y looking thing that can be any cell, right? That can be a duck cell, it can be a human cell, it can be anything. So in nature, those two viruses enter that cell and then a whole lot of magic happens inside the cell, some of which we understand, much of which we do not. And then once the virus is done replicating and doing its thing inside the cell, what can happen is you get this. You get a big mess of stuff, some of which can be exactly the same as what went in, but often it is different things that come out. So on the right-hand side of that picture, you'll see some red and some yellow. Some of the genetics are all messed up now, so you can now have… That's what reassortment is.

Mike Brasher: And so those, each of those, well, the ones that look different represent essentially a different genetic code in each of those, right? Exactly.

Lisa Kircher: And so I cannot do that math, but I think some people can do that math, but you need almost a computer to do that math. Eight gene segments with mutations going on in much of those gene segments and then those gene segments actually re-assorting inside a cell. So now you can sort of imagine the complexity of what can come out and why things can evolve so quickly.

Mike Brasher: And each of those in theory brings with it certain characteristics about transmissibility, its ability to attach to certain human cells, its ability to cause disease. Some are really concerning, some are really efficient, some are essentially maybe dead-end. They're just not very efficient at replicating, surviving, or whatever the appropriate way to describe it would be.

Lisa Kircher: All of the above. You're going to get a lot of non-functional things that happen. You're going to get a lot of the same thing that happened before and then you're going to get a lot of new things that happen. And so new things that can happen are mutations that make it more adaptable to mammals. So for instance, the reason we're so worried about adaptation in mammals is if those two viruses were to… one of them was an avian virus and one of them was a human virus, let's say, got into a person's cell and it reassorted so that the avian part or the dangerous part that can make you very sick, actually those genetics now align to make that more transmissible between people. That is what we're most worried about and that's what can happen. So again, if you think about the odds of that happening, and the math required to do all those calculations. It's a very low probability, because there's zillions and zillions of combinations of the mutations that can happen. But there's a lot of it happening. So really, you know, it's kind of like playing Russian roulette, right? Eventually, something is going to mix in just the right way so that you will have a virus that is dangerous to people and highly transmissible.

Mike Brasher: And this kind of connects back to what we talked about before and some of the innovative work that you're doing in the field to increase the speed with which you can detect these, whether it is high path, where you can more quickly get a deeper understanding of the characteristics of new viruses that you're encountering. Correct.

Kayci Messerly: And so with some of that reassortment that you see, there are some predictable kind of outcomes that you expect to see, or most of this is pretty uncontrolled and unexpected? Yes.

Lisa Kircher: Yes to both. Yes to both. Some things we would predict we can see. We do a lot of that in the laboratory. That's what our laboratory at St. Jude is for, is to test a lot of this stuff to see if our hypotheses are correct. We really just generate hypotheses and the way you go about doing that is to just try to disprove what you think. So we say, well, I think this is going to happen when we put these viruses into our animal models or our cell culture models or whatever. And then you just see if that's really what happens or not. And so we do a lot of that to sort of to say that we think we know what's going on. Most of the time we are proven wrong. That is not exactly what happened. Every single case of influenza we didn't know this was going to happen and then it happens. Okay, so if we get down into the real world now of how do you do this? How do you do this operationally?

Mike Brasher: Looks like you're going camping to me. I don't know anybody else. It looks like you're going camping. I see a dog. I think that's Jax. Is that Jax in the lower right? So let's go camping. Is that what you're doing?

Lisa Kircher: I'm just camping. Peace River, Alberta. And I'm camping in very remote places, believe it or not, because that's where the ducks are. I go camping where the ducks are. That's a picture of our surveillance site in the Peace River area, which is in northern Alberta. And we have been there every single year since 1976. And so this is one of the longest longitudinal collections of avian influenzas that exist in the world. Now, you know, I'm not gonna, it's not on my watch that we're gonna stop, so we're gonna go up there and keep doing that every year. This is your mobile lab.

Mike Brasher: So this is the mobile lab. Just to be clear, I was joking about camping. I mean, you do camp, right? Oh yeah, I live in it. But you're out there in the remote area. So the birds are taken, is it part of a banding operation? Okay. I did not know. I didn't know about this. I didn't know this has been going on for that long.

Lisa Kircher: Yes, it has been going on for that long because… St.

Mike Brasher: Jude running it all this time. Okay.

Lisa Kircher: All this time. Yes, we have had a presence there for decades and the mobile lab is a 19-foot toy hauler. So, you buy a toy hauler because toy haulers are built like to have you live in the front of it and then the back of it is built like a garage. Like most normal people would drive a four-wheeler up into that toy hauler, not me. I put crazy weird expensive lab equipment in the back, and that's what that second picture shows. There's also a picture there of that brown mushroomy thing that's a dewar full of liquid nitrogen that nobody knows that's really there. So if you didn't ask me what that was, no one would know what that was. But the inside there is tables and a chair and a bunch of equipment to do the actual PCR test for flu. And then, of course, you really, one person can barely turn around in it. And then I live in about three square feet of space on the front part of it.

Mike Brasher: That's all you need. That's all I need.

Lisa Kircher: It's great. And it is so useful for not only doing the testing, but being able to work with the wildlife managers. The people that are doing the bird catching for us are extremely generous people, but they're also working with very limited resources. If I can show up and not have to ask them for a place to stay or ask them to feed me or ask them to do anything for me other than just be there to swab a duck, then they're actually much more amenable to allowing me on site and letting me do the work. And they've been wonderful, all of them have. So that's kind of just in the real world what it looks like. And then we just hook the whole thing up to the truck and we drive it to the next spot. And then I'm able to transmit the data because I have high speed internet and everything wherever I go. And so I'm just able to transmit that back immediately.

Kayci Messerly: Can you tell us a little bit more about what the day-to-day sampling looks like for you? We see your camper, you've got a nice setup going on. What does that look like actually going out to collect your samples and bringing it back for processing?

Lisa Kircher: That's a long, long day. So it usually starts at 3 a.m. Oh my. For pre-season banding, it starts at 3 a.m. And you drive to… In this particular case in Canada, it's much more civilized. The Canadians are way more civilized than the Americans. They have swimming traps and they start at eight o'clock. And so we will go out and we will drive all day to the swimming traps in Canada and we'll get the ducks out of the trap and they're gonna ban the ducks and then they hand me the duck and usually they'll hold the duck and I will just swab the duck. It takes 10 seconds to do. It's not a burden on time at all. In the rocket net captures, in the prairie pothole region, that's a long day. You will show up at 3 a.m., they're in the duck blind by 4.30, and then you're in this position of waiting for the rocket to go off. It's very stressful. But I just mind my own business and stay quiet till the whole thing is done, and then you run out and you help capture, get the birds in the crates, and then they do the same thing. They ban the birds, and then I swap them. And you say swabbing.

Kayci Messerly: So what do the swabbing samples come from?

Lisa Kircher: So swabbing is being presented with the back end of the duck, which is called the cloaca. So the cloaca is the place where the digestive system empties into and the reproductive system empties into. It all funnels into that one place that then exits the duck. So you're presented with that part of the duck and you put a Q-tip in there and you take a swab, just like you would take a swab of your oropharyngeal cavity or your cheek or something like that.

Mike Brasher: Oropharyngeal cavity, mouth and throat.

Lisa Kircher: Correct. And that goes into a special media called vial transport media. And then it can be whatever is in there is preserved then. And so we keep that chilled. And then, so when that is all done, so that process of swabbing and banding and all of that, that usually takes all day. It either starts at 3 a.m. or anywhere till 8 a.m.

Mike Brasher: Like across all the birds, not for one bird. Like one bird, it's real quick.

Lisa Kircher: One bird is real quick.

Mike Brasher: 10, 15 seconds, something like that.

Lisa Kircher: But, you know, 150 birds takes a minute. And the banders are amazing how fast they go. So, it is on me to keep up, right? They are only as tolerant as the birds can stay in the crates.

Mike Brasher: And the reason for swabbing in those two locations? I mean obviously that's sort of the access to the inside of a bird, right? But you're looking for live virus? Looking for live virus, yes.

Lisa Kircher: And our PCR tests can test not only for live virus but also just fragments of the RNA that has been left over. If a duck is actively infected they will be replicating virus both in the throat area and as well through their digestive tract. And so that's why we look oftentimes at both ends of the duck.

Mike Brasher: Is there a tendency to get different quantities or different types of material from one location or the other?

Lisa Kircher: You will find that if the virus is an active replication, so an infection in a duck is similar to an infection in a person where the active replicative time of that virus is probably only going to be about five to seven days. So it's a pretty short period of time that the duck is actively replicating virus and shedding. But the remnants of that virus can hang around for a long time so we can detect that as well. So it's just a matter of chance. Let me give you an example of our longitudinal cohort in Alberta that we've had for decades.

Mike Brasher: Longitudinal cohort means over time.

Lisa Kircher: Means over time, sorry. So every year we go and we sample and so we have all of this data year over year and it turns out that after thousands and thousands and thousands of ducks sampled and swabbed, the relative prevalence of influenza in waterfowl is between 10 and 20%.

Mike Brasher: So you can bet… We're not restricting that to H5N1, we're just talking avian influenza in general.

Lisa Kircher: Avian influenza in general is 10 to 20% and that will be pretty true across all waterfowl populations in all sorts of geography where you are. If you have a hundred ducks, you can bet at least 10 of them are going to be positive for

Mike Brasher: It means they have actively replicating avian influenza virus of some type or another. Correct. Now the probability or the percentage of birds in the overall population that would have been exposed to avian influenza at some point in their life 100%? Got to be close to it, right? And you would look at that through testing for antibodies. Correct.

Lisa Kircher: So the serology people do a lot of that. But again, that's just getting snapshots in time. It's hard to piece that together to look at long-term immunity over time in a particular bird. So, where were we? We were back to the operation. So, okay, Casey. So, yes, all day in the field, in the swamp with the waders, you know, getting the sample and then I come back to the camper and if I have enough energy, I'll spend until about 10 or 11 that night actually running the PCR. So, that makes it a pretty long day. Sometimes if I don't, it depends on how many birds we get that day. I'll do the PCR the next day. But we've had some great experiences where I can turn the result around pretty quick and tell the wildlife managers how many birds were positive. We had a fantastic story in Louisiana where I was there for some winter banding and it was a huge duck catch. So if anybody knows the It's the setup in the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana is pretty massive, and the manager down there can catch thousands of birds at a time, so he needs lots of volunteers. And that particular duck catch had an entire troop of Boy Scouts. And I was terrified because there's children now holding duck… Because you think about this from a biologist's perspective, right? I do, I do. I think, oh my goodness. And so it was Troop 5 from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Mike Brasher: You're like, what am I enabling?

Lisa Kircher: What am I doing? Shout out to Troop 5 from Lake Charles, Louisiana. They were amazing.

Mike Brasher: Did you have trouble sleeping that night?

Lisa Kircher: I did because it happened to be the day that, the day we did that catch happened to be the day the news report broke that the individual from Louisiana was infected with D11. So it was crazy. So, but you can't, when you're doing it, when catches like that are happening, there's nothing to do except just shut up and go with the flow, right? So that's what I did. We just go with the flow and the next day I ran all the samples. It was much calmer and talked to the manager for a long time and got to have dinner with the Boy Scouts. And they were doing a big crab boil, which I have never done. And they taught me how to pick crab out of the crab. And I thought, oh my, it's a Louisiana thing. And I thought if I had to live here, I'd probably starve because I was really bad at it. But it was so much fun to learn about their community, learn about their Boy Scout troop. And I was able to tweet out to their… I think I tweeted. I might've texted. I don't remember. I don't know what it was. But the guy hands me his phone and he said, can you tell all the parents that all of these birds were negative? So at that time, all the results were mostly negative. Only had a couple positives, which was great. These were all mostly blue-winged teal. And so I was able to do that. So, one of the best stories I'm able to tell about the power of the mobile lab for community. And all of these people were hunters and they were all interested in what was going on and they wanted to learn. So, we had this amazing conversation over crab that I was unable to eat. So that's part of the attraction of the mobile lab is you're able to tell the people in the community what's going on. And they are, by and large, just the best people I've ever met. They want to know. They want to know what's going on. And you can tell them the facts. And you come from St. Jude. It's a trusted institution. It's not like the government's trying to tell them what to do. So yeah.

Mike Brasher: Now, I think, to Casey's question, kind of related to Casey's question about… Oh, so you have some results here.

Lisa Kircher: Oh, okay. So I can just finish with the results. So this is the actual data from not Alberta. This was in the Dakotas. Interestingly, it takes so long to drive from Northern Alberta back to Memphis that you can stop in North Dakota and South Dakota for quite a while and hang out with the Duck Banders there. So that just works out geographically really nice as long as you can get across Saskatchewan. But, so we did that and I spent some time there and that's just showing the real-time positives and negatives of the… broken down by species. Most of what they caught were mallards and pintails. So we had the positives and negatives, which turned out to be about, interestingly, between 10 and 20%.

Mike Brasher: That was from this past year, August-September 2024, at three refuges in the Dakotas, Jake Clark Sawyer, Arrowwood, is that right?

Kayci Messerly: Arrowwood and Sand Lake. And in Sand Lake, yep. And so the positives are that first line of bars that's closest to us? Correct. The blue, the blue squares, and the negatives are behind it.

Mike Brasher: Okay, and so I know you have, I'm not sure if it's the next slide, but you've gone out and have, yes, it's this, where you've actively participated in some of these swim-in traps. This is not too far from where we are right now. And is that, yep, that's Corey Highway in there. Many of the folks that listen to this, to our podcast will probably know Corey Highway and some of the other names out of his, out of that lab at Tennessee Tech. That's Brad Cohen's lab at Tennessee Tech. Nick Masto and Abby Blake Bradshaw, all those have, were probably part of that. So you had a pretty interesting story. I think you, was this the first time you, Tell the story about your observation of Corey getting in there and your reaction. That is a picture of what Corey does, right? Corey does this.

Lisa Kircher: He's a duck catcher. He's just a pro duck catcher, right? He just sets up these traps. He watches the camera. He's an expert at sewing GPS transmitters on ducks. That's his thesis project. He's a duck guy to the core, right? He's just that ducky. So we collaborate with their lab we have for the past two years now, and they are kind enough… So we sometimes do the sampling, but they do most of the swabbing for us. And then I go up and I have parked my mobile lab in… This is in Dyersburg, Tennessee, where a lot of the mid-continent mallards are wintering. And I just started doing the testing right away. And in November, right before Thanksgiving, I was just testing along. It was a lonely Saturday. There was nobody else around. And all of a sudden my PCR was really hot for H5. And I was sitting in the camper and I had nobody to tell. I'm like, well, I'm here, but what do I do? Because like Cory was gone. Everyone was gone. It was almost Thanksgiving. I drove home with the samples and immediately called Dr. Webby and like, okay, well, we got a hit. Now what do we do? Because now everything I thought was going to happen has actually happened. Usually you want something to happen and it doesn't happen, but this actually happened. So we brought that back to the lab, the positives, that whole trap, not that particular trap which you're watching, but a trap that would be similar to that with ring neck ducks in it. They were all positive for a highly replicating D11. And we knew that because we put it back on our sequencer as soon as we got back to the lab and knew that 24 hours later, we knew what it was. So the power of doing that is pretty special to me, like not just getting some samples and, oh, I think we'll get to it later. Well, you know, we did it right then and we knew. And so I was able to call Corey and Brad and they immediately had to adjust what they did in terms of trying to wear some more PPE, which is always a struggle to do when you're working in the field, but they did adjust some of their practices accordingly. And then we were able to take that information and then verify it with everything else that was going on in the flyway. So, okay, so I'm in just in one spot, but the rest of the flyway is also looking at this as well. And everybody was saying, it's all D11. It's all D11. Everything is D11. And we thought, OK, well, here it is in Northwest Tennessee. It was down in Louisiana. It was all up and down the flyway. And it happened to be the one that happened to infect some people. So that's just a story that is reflective of how powerful this can be. Like you can bring, now you can bring all your collaborators together and we're going to put a big paper out because of it. And just to tell the, tell the story of the 2024 winter migration and how D11 swept down all the, it was pretty much all the flyways once you got everybody involved.

Mike Brasher: So. Okay. So where do we go? Where do we go next with the story and some of the other discoveries that you've made along the way?

Lisa Kircher: Let me think. When was that? That was November. And then I went, okay, and then it was December and then that's when we went to Louisiana with the Boy Scouts. So back up. So that the D-1-1 story in Tennessee happened technically before the Boy Scout story in Louisiana. And then in January, I kind of quieted down some and mostly when… I don't understand because I will confess I am not a duck hunter, so I don't really pay attention to when hunting season opens, but people tell me and so I try to pay attention. And I think there's a period of time when hunters are actively out hunting, and so the surveillance actually goes down during that time because hunters are out harvesting.

Mike Brasher: At least your type of surveillance. There's other surveillance that takes place on harvested ducks, right? Correct, correct. But your lab does not do any of that right now?

Lisa Kircher: Not right now. We can do limited things of that, but that's usually done by our collaborators. They have better connections made. Our collaborators at the University of Georgia do a lot of passive surveillance through hunter-harvested stuff. But not to say that we can't, and we would like to get into that as well. We're trying to get into some more spaces now in the flyway. The flyway is pretty well covered for pre-season banning in terms of that, but in terms of winter sampling, it's kind of hit or miss. There's heavy duty winter sampling in Louisiana where teal are. We would like to get into more winter sampling in the mid-continent around Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, that area where the mallards go. The mallards, I've learned, are pretty lazy. They don't go all the way down to the end of the continent. They just kind of stop. A lot of them do. in the mid-continent. So we want to do better about surveilling those and also different species of ducks. We want to get more into diving ducks as well as dabblers. So that is other collaborations we're starting.

Mike Brasher: Now are there other things that you want to cover here? I forget what we have a little bit later on here in terms of… This is a graphical depiction of how D1-1 swept through the flyways.

Lisa Kircher: Those two images of viruses are how that particular reassortment happened between a genotype called A3 and a low path genetics. And that's what ended up with D11. So we covered that in the slide where we talked about reassortment. Panel B on the right is showing you, if you can see that green color that sort of dominates all of those bars, that is the D11 genotype. Usually we see a pretty more good mix of the different genotypes that are circulating, but this is showing how this particular D11 dominated the wild birds. The map below is just showing the amount of D11 detected and where it was detected and how it had come in from the west side of the continent and then spread through the flyways. That is showing our particular detections between us and Environment Canada. There's a lot more out there detections that we don't have. all the data assembled yet that is contributed by the USDA and others.

Mike Brasher: And do I remember, did I hear you say that it's a bit unusual for a new genotype to spread and become so dominant so quickly and anytime that happens that kind of… causes you a little bit of concern or just sort of heightens the level of uncertainty and maybe there is some elevated concern.

Lisa Kircher: It is somewhat about D11, but it's also more about the 2344B clade in general, which D11 is a part of. That is what is most concerning. It is that ability of that particular clade of virus to jump into mammals as it has been doing and getting into things like dairy cattle and all the small mammals we've heard about. There's lots of detections in mammals now. When they are detected in the small terrestrial mammals, that's often fatal and that's a neurological presentation, which is another thing that is different that we have not seen before, is when you have a neurological presentation of a flu virus in an animal, that is uniformly fatal as well.

Mike Brasher: Now, it is neurological in birds, right? But now you're saying the difference is that it's showing those neurological presentation in mammals? In small terrestrial mammals.

Kayci Messerly: And so as you're seeing this change for there to be infection in mammals as well, you've seen that, now what are you starting to look for? You're testing, what changes are you worried about seeing?

Lisa Kircher: We are looking specifically for mutational adaptations when the virus gets into a mammal, whether any mammal, including people. So luckily so far when we isolate viruses out of the mammals, there are a few mutations that have made it more adaptable to mammals, but it is still fundamentally a bird virus, which means it's kind of almost a dead end host from the mammalian perspective. The thing that will cause all the alarm bells to go off is if it gets into a person or another mammal and it mutates to such a way that it can then become transmissible easily between the mammals, that's when all of the alarm bells are going to go off. And so that's kind of the smoking gun that we're trying to look for, waiting for really.

Kayci Messerly: So we've talked a little bit about the changes that we've seen and the concerns that we're looking out for going forward. What are kind of the key take home messages that we are getting from this talk? Okay.

Lisa Kircher: Yeah, I did talk in a lot of detail about a lot of virology. So what is the take home message? What is the meaningful shift, right? The meaningful shift is that to be aware as a waterfowl and a hunting community that there is a significant increase in wild bird mortality in the past few years and that does not seem to be changing, not yet. It is a bit seasonal. We do know that when birds migrate south, they're carrying a lot of virus with them because a lot of the juveniles are migrating and then that tends to… lessen through the winter as the virus kind of blows through the population and then a lot less is carried back up northward when they migrate north. So to be aware of the increase in wild bird mortality, which is going to change the landscape ecologically. So if you're a bird ecologist, that's something to be very concerned about. Also to be concerned about the neurological presentation that I talked about in the mammals. That's a different presentation than what we're used to seeing. It's not unknown and in older flu viruses we have seen that in some of the more dangerous H5s. That just means the virus can invade your nervous system very readily and that just means it's a very, very highly pathogenic virus and so we want to look out for that. And that we do now have a fair amount of human cases in North America. So you know that's not to be unexpected but two of them were severe and we've had a couple fatalities. So there was a fatality in Louisiana and now there's been one in Mexico as well. and that was a child. So, that's something to also be concerned about. So, that's really what we want to watch out for. What I would say as a final, you know, to the waterfowl hunting community is that you guys, you are all on the front lines and your risk is probably not any greater. It's not as a high risk as if you were a worker in a dairy farm and you were, you know, really getting assaulted with tons and tons of virus like those people are. Your advantage is that you're outside most of the time. And so I think you've talked about that on your previous podcast before. Like being outside is great and not in a confined space where lots of these fomites blow around and in small spaces. So staying outside is great. If you're able to use even just a simple pair of gloves when you're handling your harvested birds, that goes a long way. And what we tell all the Boy Scouts is just don't pick your nose and touch your face after you've touched a bird because that's the message that hits home town. to all the teenagers.

Mike Brasher: Live to tell the story.

Lisa Kircher: Exactly. Just keep your hands away from your face and that will actually go quite a long way. It comes honestly back to what your grandmother taught you how to do, you know, wash your hands and stay out of the mud. But then that's normally, I mean, who knows if it becomes transmissible between people, that's a whole nother ballgame. But that's where we are right now. Where we want to go is just to continue to build the mobile lab capacity. So I'm pretty much a one-man band right now, and I'm looking for more support and more help to be able to just expand the program some more.

Mike Brasher: Thank you for all the work that you do. Thanks to hunters, waterfowl researchers, all the folks that you've interacted with, all the folks that many of your colleagues, professional colleagues in USDA, APHIS, and USGS, all of these different groups of researchers that are with you and with waterfowl hunters out there on the front lines. collecting this data, helping grow our understanding of avian influenza, and we are at Ducks Unlimited, again, trying to do our part to make waterfowl hunters informed, make sure they're getting good information, make sure they're understanding the risks associated with this. There are some risks, but I think I hear you saying our understanding right now continues to be that the risk to humans, whether you're a waterfowl hunter or or the average person remains low overall. It does stand to reason that waterfowl hunters are going to be exposed to it a little bit more than the average person. So, just be aware of that. Take those precautions. You know, we talked with Dr. Webby, Dr. Stalneck, I believe, on a recent episode. Even something as simple as if you're a waterfowl hunter and it's during the waterfowl hunting season and you're feeling ill and you go to the doctor and they're going to test you for the normal human flu virus. There's nothing wrong with saying, oh, by the way, I'm also a waterfowl hunter. I've been out in an area where I know there have been a lot of dead birds. That's not uncommon at all for people to be talking about that type of thing now. as waterfowl hunters, maybe that prompts the doctor to also test you for avian influenza. I think Dr. Webby and Dr. Stalnick was saying that's a huge gap in our understanding. It's not to say that gap being awareness of when humans might get it, but just be asymptomatic or rather mildly symptomatic. You know, those types of things largely go unnoticed and untested for, right? Correct.

Lisa Kircher: We are very certain of that, that the actual prevalence of people getting exposed to avian flu in North America is vastly underreported. So if you do have mild symptoms you may just get over it and not ever go to the doctor. But if you make that connection in your mind and you are in a place where you can get tested, people in healthcare settings now are so aware of bird flu now that it would not become as a shock to them. They would be like, oh, you have been exposed to wild birds and you have these flu-like symptoms, then they would probably be able to test. And that just means that it's just more data that we have that would be furthering, you know, our knowledge of how prevalent this really is, because we really have no idea at this point.

Mike Brasher: Now let me ask you a question, and if you say that's not my area of expertise, and I'll defer to somebody else, that's fine. But if that were to happen, and if I test positive for avian influenza, what do we know about the medical profession's likely… Are they likely to recommend anything other than what they ordinarily would for the regular human flu?

Lisa Kircher: No, I can answer that basically. I'm not a medical doctor, but it works the same as regular seasonal flu. The trick with flu is that you have to get to the doctor quickly. For some of those treatments to really be effective. Most people, including myself, will get sick and say, well, I'll just get over it in a few days. And then, you know, six days pass and you're not over it and you're even sicker. Then you go to the doctor. Then it's too late. So if you can make that connection. Well, I was just out hunting. I just handled a bunch of birds and now I'm sick. I should go to the doctor sooner rather than later. Really that would be the message because then if we can get you the ulcerative colitis or the Tamiflu is what it's called, that can actually make quite a big difference and it just makes you feel better quicker, right? You don't suffer. I mean if you've actually really had influenza, you will never forget it. Like you may not die but you'll want to die for a few days. It can make you that sick. So the reason to get there early is you can either cross it off the list that that's not what you have or if it is what you have then they can actually provide you treatment but it does have to be early in the disease. Cool.

Mike Brasher: Casey, anything else?

Kayci Messerly: I don't think so right now. Thank you so much, though, for this educational opportunity. And like we've said to hunters, like anything you can do, small things, throw some hand sanitizer in your bag, use it at the end or before you pick your nose, I guess.

Mike Brasher: Pick your nose. Use that sanitizer first, right?

Kayci Messerly: There's nothing wrong with picking your nose. Just use your hand sanitizer first. But once again, don't poke it.

Lisa Kircher: Don't stick your finger in your eye.

Kayci Messerly: Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa Kircher: Well, thank you. Yeah, I hope I can come back later and give you another update.

Mike Brasher: Absolutely. It's been great having you here. Thank you for all the work that you do and Dr. Webby as well. Michael Sheffield, who's in here in studio, been hiding out and accompanied you here, plays an important role in helping with your communication efforts there at St. Jude's. And we thank you for all that you do. Thank all the waterfowl hunters. Thank all of your colleagues that are contributing to this and stay informed. Get good information. We're going to try to bring that information to you, and we will continue to keep an eye on this, and we'll all learn as we go forward. So, thank you, Dr. Kircher, for being with us. Thank you for the great information. All right. Thank you. We also thank our producers here in studio, Chris Isaac and Rachel Jared, for the great work that they do. I thank my co-host, Casey Messerly, over here, before I forget on that. And then, of course, we thank you, the listener and the viewer, for spending your time for us and for your support of wetlands and waterfowl conservation and science.