To understand the expansion of the avian complaint, it must be emphasized that «it is not a single virusbut of a very wide group of viruses with their respective lineages and coincidences», explains beer martin, director of the Institute for Diagnostic Virology (IVD) of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut in Germany. The wide genetic variety would explain, on the one hand, why the infections would spread so quickly and, on the other, why they would manage to infect more and more species of animals.
One of the hypotheses to explain the real explosion of cases of bird flu has to do with the migratory routes of the animals. As suggested by an article published in ‘Scientific Reports’, the viruses responsible for the latest ‘boom’ of infections in Europe could have been transported from Iceland, Greenland and the Arctic through the migratory routes of wild birds.