A Bird’s Eye View of H5N1
Words by Professor Ariella Helfgott. Illustration by Stavroula Adameitis.
Bird flu has reached our coast, and more shocks like it will follow. We can't stop them coming. We can decide how ready, and how healthy, we are when they do.
A southern giant petrel was found sick at Knights Beach, on the Fleurieu south of Adelaide, in mid-June, and taken into care. It is a big ocean bird that breeds near Antarctica and rarely comes near people. It had bird flu. That is how the thing everyone had half-expected finally arrived, not with a bang, but with one tired seabird on a beach. The Premier confirmed the result on 24 June. Days earlier, the CSIRO had found the first mainland cases near Esperance in WA.
So it is here, and you probably have the same blunt questions as everyone else. Is it dangerous to me? Is the chicken in my fridge safe? Are eggs about to cost a fortune again? Is this the next pandemic? Vigilant, not frightened, is about the right footing.
This is a story about readiness and resilience. The bird flu is here, and more shocks like it will follow over the coming decades. We do not get to choose that. What we get to choose is the state they find us in: the health of our ecosystems and how much they can absorb, the disease monitoring, the plans, the medical defences. That state is built slowly, in the calm years beforehand, not in the scramble once a crisis has started. By then it is too late. And what rides on it is not one thing, or one kind of person's worry. It is our farmers and our coastal towns, the export markets we live off, the wildlife found nowhere else on Earth, the way of living here we mean to hand on, and, at the far end, the chance of a human pandemic that would touch everyone. That readiness and resilience is being built, or let slip, right now, whether we are paying attention or not. So the real question is not about the bird, it is about us.
Here is the situation.
What We Know
We caught it early, and that is a genuine win. In a lot of countries the virus was deep inside the chicken sheds before anyone knew it had landed. We found ours first, in a few sick wild birds on remote beaches. That is the difference between seeing a threat coming and being mugged by it. It was not luck. Michelle Wille at the University of Melbourne and Marcel Klaassen at Deakin spent years swabbing arriving migratory birds and finding no sign of it, because our virus comes through seabirds rather than the ducks and geese that carry it elsewhere, a narrower door, which is why we were the last continent it reached. Behind that early sighting sits more than 113 million dollars of federal preparation since 2024 and a response plan that is written and rehearsed.
The food is currently safe and the everyday risk to people is low.No poultry anywhere in Australia has it yet. The federal Agriculture Minister, Julie Collins, said it plainly: chicken and eggs, cooked normally, are fine to eat. Bird flu is overwhelmingly a disease of birds, and the rare human cases worldwide have nearly all been people in close, daily contact with infected animals.
It is a different beast from the flu we beat last year.The 2024 H7 outbreak was stopped by culling 1.8 million birds. That is a grim thing to do and not a small one, it is also why eggs went scarce and dear for a while. It was gone by mid-2025. This strain, as ANU's Robyn Alders explains, does not play that way. It has settled permanently into wild birds across the globe and reaches mammals in a way the old one never did. You cannot cull the seabirds of the Southern Ocean. Stamping it out is not on the table.
Which means it is here to stay. The job is no longer to beat it. It is to live with it well, and to be ready not for one shock but for the run of them.
What We Don’t Know
How far and how fast it spreads, whether it reaches farms, and how hard it hits our wildlife all come down to bird movements, weather and luck. The bad end of the range is real: on our own Heard Island, three-quarters of the elephant seal pups died in the worst season. The gentler end is real too, and on the same island the albatross came through with no unusual deaths. We do not yet know which way our coast goes. We do know where we are already weakest, which is the stretch of coast the algal bloom spent the last year degrading.
Then the question behind all the others. Is this the next pandemic?The useful first move is to ask: a pandemic for whom? For wild birds, this already is one. For people, right now, it is broadly inconsequential, because the virus does not bind to the receptors in our airways, so it does not pass between us. Could that change? A flu pandemic some day is treated by most experts as a matter of when, not if. Whether this virus is the one is a different question, and the change that would make it so, the tweak that lets it lock onto human airways, has not happened despite the virus infecting people at various spots in the world since 1997 and circulating at vast scale since 2021. That barrier is real, not flimsy. There is a 2025 paper titled "Is a human H5N1 pandemic inevitable?", and the answer it reaches is: not inevitable, and not negligible either.
The risk runs through the animal disease reservoir, which is also where the lever is. The more animals get it, and the closer they are to humans genetically, the higher the chance it crosses over. Cows and pigs matter far more than seabirds here, because they are genetically closer to us. An animal carrying two flus at once allows the viruses to swap genes, combining the lethality of H5N1 with the easy spread of ordinary flu. That process is called reassortment, and it is how the last several flu pandemics began. Across millions of animals it becomes a numbers game, the law of large numbers, which is why the whole point is to give the virus fewer rolls of the dice.
The health of other species is not a side issue for people. It is our own front line. Keeping other species safe keeps humans safe.Keeping the virus in check in animals is how we keep it away from us, which is the principle named One Health: human, animal and environmental health are one system, not three. First Nations people have said this for tens of thousands of years, that people, animals and Country are bound together rather than separate, and nothing demonstrates the point more bluntly than a cross-species virus.
So this is not a "when" we sit and wait for. It is a risk we lower and manage, by keeping the reservoir small and watching it closely.
There is a genuine argument among thoughtful people about how worried to be, and it is worth hearing both sides. Zeynep Tufekci, writing in May about a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship, made the case she has made for years: another pandemic is certain, what we control is our readiness, and we keep failing to learn the lessons. Biosecurity researchers like Kevin Slavin push back gently on the particular alarms: the recurring scares that frighten us by reaching a wealthy country, hantavirus, Marburg, the odd human bird flu case, are mostly not the thing to spend our worry on, and the one that would matter is that specific human-transmissible change, which has not come. Both are right about the part that counts. Take readiness seriously, and watch the variables, rather than jumping at every shadow. That hantavirus scare, for the record, ended with the monitoring closed and no wider spread.
As this spreads, so will the noise. The tells are old ones: a frightening number with no context, a miracle cure or a villain to blame, someone insisting the whole thing is either nothing at all or the end of the world. The truth is usually narrower and more boring than any of that.
And yes, since you are wondering, you can still have a runny yolk. The "cook your eggs firm" line is an American message, from a country where the virus is loose in its flocks. Here, with no infected poultry, your weekend egg is not a bird flu risk yet. The standing rules are the ordinary ones: never eat a bird that was sick or died for no reason. And if you drink raw milk, the one thing worth knowing is that this virus has turned up in raw milk overseas where dairy herds are infected, which ours are not, so the risk here is low for now and worth keeping an eye on.
The one big unknown we actually control is how well we respond. That is a choice, not a forecast.
What Could Happen: A Bird’s Eye View
Nobody can predict this.So get up above it for a moment and take in the whole field.
Two things shape what comes next. One is the virus, how hard it hits, which is mostly out of our hands. The other is how prepared we are, which is mostly in ours. And to be fair about it, Australia has done a great deal here and done it well: among the best-prepared biosecurity systems in the world, rehearsed national response plans, more than a billion dollars in the system, and years of wild-bird surveillance that are the reason we caught this one early. So the question is not whether we start from scratch. It is whether we extend that same seriousness to the two places it has not yet fully reached: watching the animal reservoir that breeds a pandemic, the livestock as much as the seabirds, and treating the health of our ecosystems as a foundation we invest in for the long haul, rather than a line we fund when the threat is already at the door. Cross the severity of the virus with how far we take that, and you get four pictures of the next few years.
Back to Sleep. A mild virus, and our attention moves on. The strong start is not built on. The surveillance money tapers, the watch on livestock never quite catches up to the watch on seabirds, the ecosystem work stays a one-off rather than a habit, and we file the whole thing under scares that came to nothing. No great bill this year, but we have banked nothing, and we are no readier, and our coast no healthier, when the next thing arrives. The most likely default, precisely because nothing forces our hand.
Caught Out Again. A severe virus, meeting a response that is strong on paper but stretched thin where it counts. We catch it in the seabirds, as we did, but it reaches livestock before we see it, because that is the part we never fully watched, and it lands on a coast still worn down from the bloom. The bill is brutal and on every front at once: culls and an egg and chicken crunch, exports stalled, seafood and tourism hit while still on their knees, and a health system bracing because we cannot see clearly whether the virus is creeping toward people. This is the corner where the next pandemic, if it is coming, gets its best run at us. Hard, and avoidable.
Hit but Holding.A severe virus, but a state that took its strong start and finished the job. We still take losses, because the virus is hard. But the reservoir is watched across livestock and wildlife alike, healthier ecosystems absorb the blow instead of buckling under it, the exposed workers are offered the vaccine we make, and a dangerous change would be caught fast. The economic damage is real but contained, public health holds, and the pandemic risk is actively pressed down rather than left to chance. We come out with the foundations stronger than we found them.
Ahead of It. A mild virus, and a state that builds anyway. We get a fair run and use it, turning a good response system into a lasting one. Not disaster avoided so much as ground gained: the reservoir watched end to end, a coast in better shape paying its way through seafood, tourism and the clean-green name, vulnerable species pulled back from the edge. Healthier, better off and safer than we started, with the next shock already half prepared for. This is the one to aim for, and from where we stand it is well within reach.
We do not get to pick our virus. We do get to choose whether we build on the strong start we have made, especially in watching the reservoir and tending the ecosystems beneath everything else, or let it lapse, and that choice, far more than the virus, is what decides which of these we land in: in dollars, in lives, and in whether the next pandemic ever gets going.
The worst case is worth spelling out plainly, because it reaches a long way past the birds.
It is not the virus alone. It is the pile-up: bird flu tearing through wildlife in a summer when another marine heatwave returns and a dry year drops the Murray, three blows on a coast with no time to get up between them. Each is survivable alone. Together they push a weakened system past a line it does not come back from.
Start with the hip pocket, where most people feel things first. If the virus gets into poultry the way it has overseas, mass culls follow, and eggs and chicken go scarce and dear, worse and for longer than the round that emptied the shelves last year. Whole farms go under. Export markets can shut overnight, and our poultry and meat trade runs to billions. The seafood sector, still on its knees from the bloom, cops another hit. Tourism on Kangaroo Island and down the coast, the kind people travel a long way for, thins out. These are South Australian jobs and businesses, not abstractions.
Then the big one, the reason governments treat this seriously at all. If the virus ever makes the jump and starts passing between people, that is the next pandemic, potentially a far more dangerous one than COVID. That is the low-odds, high-cost tail, not the likely path, and it is exactly what the watching and the vaccines are for. But it is on the table, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
And the part some of us grieve and others shrug at: in one bad season we could lose a real share of the only Australian sea lions on Earth, around 12,000 of them left, along with our little penguins and seabirds, the way South America lost more than 30,000 sea lions. That is a loss measured in decades, or never undone. You do not have to love a sea lion to feel it. A coast stripped of its wildlife is a coast that stops drawing tourists, stops selling its clean-green name, and stops paying its way.
Here is what the virus does not care about: how you vote, or whether you give two hoots about a petrel or a sea lion. It comes for the grocery bill, the job, the export dollar, the health system and your kids' future all the same. Getting ready is not a green thing or a city thing. It is a South Australian thing, in fact an all of Australia thing.
And here is the part that never makes the news, the part that changes the mood of the whole story. One piece of our defences is already world-class. We make the vaccine. The pre-pandemic H5 shot that Europe and the United States are buying is made by CSL Seqirus, an Australian company, which in December 2025 opened a new billion-dollar plant in Melbourne, the only cell-based flu vaccine plant in the Southern Hemisphere, able to turn out 150 million doses in a pandemic's first wave. CSL has made Australia's pandemic vaccines since 1919. Moderna now runs an mRNA plant at Monash as well. In a pandemic, the countries that make their own get first call on it. That is the difference between sovereign and exposed we wrote about with fuel, and on this one we are firmly on the right side of it.
The Real Test
Look back at those four futures and notice what moves us between them. It is not the virus. We do not control that. It is whether we treat the health of our living systems as the foundation of our own health and prosperity or keep treating it as a side issue we will get to later.
Here is the uncomfortable part. That choice has been made badly, for a long time, by all of us and by every side of politics. Not because anyone is against nature, but because we have let it become a fringe concern, a thing for environmentalists, when it is in fact the ground the whole economy stands on.
And the people making that case loudest are not the activists. They are the bankers and the Treasuries. The landmark review on the economics of biodiversity was commissioned by the British Treasury, and it concluded that nature can no longer be absent from the accounts that run our national finances or ignored by the people who make economic decisions. The World Bank calls nature a blind spot in economic policy, because we do not price what its loss costs us. The World Economic Forum reckons more than half of global output depends on nature outright. In Australia, one of the sharpest voices for treating nature as economic foundation is Ken Henry, a former Secretary of the Treasury, who argues that fixing our broken nature laws is not green tape but economic reform. When the deregulators and the central bankers are the ones calling nature infrastructure, it has stopped being a left or right question.
Yet it still gets treated as one. Australia's attempt to modernise its national nature laws stalled in 2024, was abandoned in early 2025, and then, almost as a parting act, the laws were weakened instead. That was not one party's doing. The reform could not clear the Senate, industry pushed hard against it, and no side was willing to spend the capital to carry it. The same pattern showed up closer to home. When the algal bloom hit, the Premier and the federal Opposition both asked for it to be declared a natural disaster, and the request was refused, because our system does not even have a category that treats an ecological collapse as the emergency it is. Across the board, we fund the response to the crisis and starve the work that would have prevented it. In the middle of the worst marine event in the state's history, some of the researchers studying it were losing their jobs.
The reason is not a mystery. The health of an ecosystem is a slow, quiet variable. It does not show up on a balance sheet, it does not bleed on the news, and you can run it down for years without anything appearing to break, right up until it does. So it loses, every budget, to the things that are loud and fast and visible this week. That is the trap, and naming it is the first step out.
None of this asks anyone to love a sea lion. It asks us to see the coast, the soil, the rivers and the reef for what they actually are: the infrastructure underneath the farming, the fishing, the tourism and the trade that keep this state standing. The real test of the next decade is not whether the bird flu turns mild or severe. It is whether we find the courage, all of us, to treat that infrastructure as fundamental, and to tend it in the calm years instead of just mourning it in the crisis ones.
What We Can Do
The response is the part we own, so this is where the attention belongs. And we are not the first to face this, which means we can learn on someone else's dime.
One fork is whether to vaccinate poultry. Most exporters, Australia included, have relied on stamping out, because vaccinated birds can still carry the virus without dying and that complicates the disease-free status our exports depend on. France broke ranks and began vaccinating its ducks in late 2023, saw outbreaks fall sharply, and promptly had some trading partners restrict its poultry; China has long vaccinated; the European Medicines Agency had cleared five animal vaccines by late 2025.
On the human side, several countries moved to protect the most exposed. Finland was first, vaccinating at-risk workers in June 2024 after culling half a million fur animals, and the European Union and Canada have since locked in doses for farmers, vets and health staff. The cautionary tale is the United States, which culled more than 100 million birds, watched eggs spike and the virus settle into over a thousand dairy herds, and then wound back its own mRNA vaccine funding in 2025, a gap the rest of the world had to step in to fill. The lesson across all of it: these moves work, they carry real trade-offs, and they are far easier made as a deliberate choice than in a panic.
The useful moves for us are the no-regrets ones, the kind that pay off whether the virus fizzles or turns serious. If it comes to nothing, we are still glad we did them. If it gets bad, they are what save us most.
Keep watching, in more places. Our wild-bird surveillance is strong, and Indigenous rangers do vital early detection in the north. The room to grow is in wastewater, in everyday reporting, and above all in livestock disease surveillance across the board, not just poultry but cattle and pigs, which is where the reservoir risk concentrates. Closer to home, it is the Coorong, the sea lion colonies, and the coast the bloom already weakened. The more eyes, the earlier the warning, and early warning is the cheapest protection there is.
There is also a deeper kind of expertise to draw on. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rangers already run one of the country's most effective early-warning networks, with around seventy groups doing animal and aquatic health surveillance across the northern coastline, pairing tens of thousands of years of observation with modern molecular tools in genuinely two-way science. They are watching the same interconnected system the rest of us are only now naming. Any surveillance that draws on that knowledge and their Country has to be built with them and handled on their terms, but the capability is already there, and it is world-class.
Protect the vulnerable populations now, while they are still healthy, so a bad season is a setback and not an ending. Offer the vaccine we make to the workers who would meet this first. Do the groundwork now on whether and when we would ever vaccinate poultry, with the industry in the room, so it is a decision rather than a panic.
The honest pitch to producers is not about shutting anyone down, and it is not just for poultry farmers. It runs to anyone running livestock, because the cattle and pigs are where the real reservoir risk sits. In theory the cleanest response to an infected property is to lock it down hard, and in practice we cannot, which is exactly why surveillance carries the load instead. The line that lands is the plain one: none of you wants to be the next wet market in Wuhan. You do not need to close the gates. You do need to know what is moving through your animals, report it fast, and help us see the virus coming before it gets close to people. That is not red tape. It is the cheapest protection a producer has, for their own stock and for everyone downstream.
And keep the ecosystems themselves healthy, the part that sounds like it is about nature and is really about money and nerve. A depleted system comes apart under a shock; a healthy one takes the hit and holds. That coast and country are the foundation under the seafood, the tourism and the clean-green premium our wine and produce trade on. This is One Health in practice, the principle from earlier turned into a budget line: keeping the wider system healthy is how we keep ourselves safe. So what does keeping it healthy actually mean? Concrete, unglamorous things: fish stocks, seagrass and reef in good shape rather than stripped bare, clean water down the Murray at the right times, monitoring that runs in the calm and not only after the disaster, and vulnerable populations like the sea lions kept well above the line where one bad season tips them over. Most of it is work we already know how to do and have let lapse.
And it is already being done here. On the Yorke Peninsula, the Northern and Yorke Landscape Board runs Marna Banggara, a rewilding project led with the Narungga people whose name means healthy, prosperous Country. It has brought the brush-tailed bettong back after more than a century, not behind a fence but across around 140,000 hectares of working farmland, parks and towns, with foxes and feral cats controlled and the recovering native animals expected to help hold down farm pests like rabbits and mice. Conservation and agriculture pulling the same way. That is what tending the foundation looks like, and the landscape boards are the proven, paid-for machinery that already does it.
The rub is that we fund this kind of work in fits and starts, project to project, always made to prove itself again, when it should be standing infrastructure. Marna Banggara has just gone looking for partners with a prospectus that makes exactly this case, that investment in nature is essential infrastructure underpinning resilient industries and prosperous communities. No part of a system does well in a failing system, and investing in what already works, kept funded between the crises, is the cheapest insurance we have against this shock and the next.
None of this needs heroics. If you find a sick or dead wild bird, the move is to leave it, keep the dog away, and call Australia’s National Emergency Animal Disease Hotlineon 1800 675 888. That single call is real surveillance, the same way ordinary people tracked the bloom one dead fish at a time.
South Australia is small enough that the right people for almost any problem fit around one table, and stubborn enough to argue about water quality on a community page for a year. Pointed at getting ready rather than at blame, that is an advantage. We are not a big system that turns slowly. We are a small one that can turn fast when it decides to.
The state showed that in the bloom, putting more than 100 million dollars behind the coast and its fishers. The fair lesson, which the Senate inquiry drew too, is that we were a step behind when it landed. That is the ordinary human pattern, andgetting in front of the next one is the entire point of foresight.
Sources, In Brief
Detections and official advice: CSIRO Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness; the Premier of South Australia and the Department for Environment and Water; the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, with Minister Julie Collins.
The science: Dr Michelle Wille (University of Melbourne) and Professor Marcel Klaassen (Deakin) on the flyway;
Professor Robyn Alders (ANU) on H5 versus H7;
the WHO and the 2025 review "Is a human H5N1 pandemic inevitable?";
Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times, 12 May 2026, and biosecurity researchers on calibrating concern. Our wildlife: the Australian Antarctic Program on Heard Island;
UC Davis on South American sea lions;
the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Food safety: Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the NSW Food Authority and SA Health. Vaccines: CSL Seqirus on its Tullamarine facility;
Moderna and the Australian and Victorian governments on the Monash mRNA plant. On the economics of nature: the Dasgupta Review (commissioned by HM Treasury, 2021);
the World Bank on natural capital;
the World Economic Forum on nature and GDP;
and Ken Henry on nature law reform.
On Australia's nature laws: the stalled Nature Positive reforms and the 2020 Samuel review of the EPBC Act.
On resilience and hope: C. S. Holling;
Brian Walker and David Salt, "Resilience Thinking";
David Quammen, "Spillover";
Charles Snyder;
and the Stockdale Paradox, from Jim Collins.
