“The solution to avian flu” could be a genetically modified chicken that doesn’t infect other fowl when it’s hit by the deadly virus, says a National Geographic blog post. Reporter Tamar Haspel describes work at the University of Cambridge to genetically modify Isa Brown chickens so they carry a decoy fragment of the genetic sequence that the flu virus uses to replicate itself. An infected chicken will die but it won’t pass along the virus to the rest of the flock. Virology specialist Laurence Tiley says “it wouldn’t take much” to make the trait available to producers, writes Haspel. The modification would have to be introduced into a chicken breed used commercially and a flock built up from that.
“What stands between the GM chicken and commercial implementation,” Haspel notes, “is opposition to using genetic modification techniques to mess with animals, a concern Tiley hears often,” and he doesn’t expect GM chickens on the British or U.S. market any time soon. More likely, Tiley said, is that a country with a more pragmatic view of GM will go first.
The USDA says more than 49 million fowl, mostly turkeys and egg-laying hens, died from avian influenza or were killed to prevent the disease from spreading during a six-month epidemic early this year.