{"id":845397,"date":"2026-09-12T15:38:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T15:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/845397\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T15:38:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T15:38:09","slug":"us-scientists-turn-to-chickens-to-sound-the-alarm-as-west-nile-cases-rise-delaware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/845397\/","title":{"rendered":"US scientists turn to chickens to sound the alarm as West Nile cases rise | Delaware"},"content":{"rendered":"

The start of West Nile virus transmission began unusually early in some US states, with the most cases in early summer since 2004, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned<\/a> in July \u2013 so Delaware turned to chickens.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey kind of are the proverbial canary in the coal mine,\u201d said Tom Moran, head of the mosquito control section at the Delaware<\/a> department of natural resources and environmental control.<\/p>\n

Sentinel chickens, as they\u2019re called, serve as an early warning for mosquito-borne diseases, especially Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) and West Nile.<\/p>\n

They can often predict<\/a> when virus activity begins ramping up, allowing officials to target mosquito control efforts and warn the public about taking precautions. Doctors know to be on the lookout when patients have flu-like symptoms \u2013 especially when it\u2019s not flu season \u2013 and that can help reach diagnosis faster. Veterinarians can make sure horses are vaccinated.<\/p>\n

The chicken itself is a \u201cdead-end host\u201d, Moran said. They can test positive for the viruses, but they can\u2019t spread the diseases, which is why they\u2019re ideal sentinels, he said.<\/p>\n

Delaware keeps flocks of four chickens each at 20 locations throughout the state, a program that began in the early 1980s. It\u2019s a relatively lo-tech way to monitor and prepare for the viruses, which can be deadly.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is kind of the old-school gold standard,\u201d Moran said. Some states have transitioned to testing mosquito pools, which can be a faster way to detect viruses, because it takes about a week for the chickens to develop antibodies after being bitten.<\/p>\n

They tried both in Delaware, but decided to go with the chickens only. \u201cThe chickens sometimes pick up virus activity in an area that the mosquito pools did not,\u201d Moran said. Unlike the insects, they don\u2019t fly away \u2013 which means officials can be certain that infected mosquitoes are active in that exact area.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gives you a little more surgical information,\u201d Moran said. \u201cYou take that information and try to use it to lessen the specter of any human transmission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cases usually start appearing from north to south as migrating birds pass the viruses to mosquitoes, Moran said. Delaware\u2019s season usually begins in early August.<\/p>\n

The chickens could also be tested for other mosquito-borne illnesses if they emerge. That\u2019s what happened when West Nile appeared in Delaware starting in 2000. At first, officials would test wild birds found dead to see if they had the virus, but they soon began testing the sentinel chickens they already had.<\/p>\n

Some places test for other local mosquito-borne illnesses, suchas St Louis encephalitis. If a neighboring state were to detect a pathogen like that, \u201cwe could probably pretty quickly get up to speed and start testing for that here too\u201d, Moran said.<\/p>\n

The decades of data collected from sentinel chickens on virus patterns can be invaluable for creating models that predict the severity of a season. That\u2019s what Lindsay Campbell, associate professor of entomology and nematology at the University of Florida, has focused on in her research<\/a>. She digitized decades of paper records from Florida\u2019s Department of Health and mosquito control programs, and she\u2019s also drawn on environmental patterns \u2013 temperature, precipitation, land cover \u2013 as well as community science data like eBird to track bird migration patterns.<\/p>\n

The data, and the models built from it, can offer insight into the conditions driving good and bad years for West Nile and EEE.<\/p>\n

The sentinel chickens are providing important data \u201ctelling us what happened, while we would like to know what might happen in the future\u201d, said Robert Guralnick, curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History and a co-author with Campbell.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gives us the opportunity to go ahead and see the ebbs and flows, essentially, of these viruses over time, and then we can try to link them with different environmental characteristics to see if we can maybe predict when there might be elevated activity in the natural environment,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n

There are many factors likely involved in how diseases like these spread \u2013 the hosts, like mosquitoes, birds, and other animals, as well as environmental conditions. That makes it complicated to predict how severe a year will be. But these models are examining, for instance, if weather patterns or temperatures from four or six or twelve months earlier affect how bad a viral season is.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor some viruses, like EEE virus, we\u2019ve seen a strong association with a certain type of landscape that is associated with the mosquito vector \u2013 that\u2019s really important for that virus,\u201d Campbell said. For West Nile virus, they\u2019ve identified some precipitation and temperature patterns a few months before chickens start testing positive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe information that these programs have been able to provide is really invaluable,\u201d Campbell said of sentinel chickens. Guralnick agreed. \u201cIt\u2019s a clever way to gather really good information about what\u2019s happening,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Over the decades, officials have tried new things and learned what works best. For the first few years of the Delaware program, they used white leghorn chickens \u2013 but they proved, in Moran\u2019s words, to be \u201cvery flighty\u201d. They frequently tried to escape, running into the bushes and forests.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s literally like a scene from Rocky, where you\u2019re chasing the chicken around \u2013 you can\u2019t catch these things,\u201d Moran said. It would sometimes take an hour to track the chickens down. Once they switched to a breed of Rhode Island red chickens, their work went much more smoothly.<\/p>\n

Similarly, officials have experimented with other means of tracking mosquito-borne illnesses, including one research project<\/a> that proposes using honey traps to catch the insects. \u201cWe\u2019re always looking: is there a better way, a faster way, a cheaper way, a more accurate way \u2013 it checks all those boxes?\u201d Moran said. \u201cFolks are always pushing the ball forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for now, chickens rule the roost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The start of West Nile virus transmission began unusually early in some US states, with the most cases…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":845398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-845397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/845398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}