TikTok Emu Emmanuel Is Ill, Avian Flu Kills 99% Birds On Farm

If you somehow believe that avian influenza is just for the birds, take a look at what’s happened at Knuckle Bump Farms in Florida. Farm owner Taylor Blake tweeted on Saturday that a bird flu outbreak has killed 99% of the domesticated birds on her farm. That’s included the heartbreaking loss of ducks, geese, chickens, and three emus: Emily, Eliza and Elliot. Avian influenza has also struck the most famous bird of them all on Knuckle Bump Farms: an emu named Emmanuel Todd Lopez. While that left things very touch and go for Emmanuel for a while, Blake’s updates suggest that he may be on the road to recovery. And maybe having such a well-known bird get affected will bring more attention to controlling the spread of avian influenza.

Emmanuel the Emu rose to fame on TikTok early this year after his screen-hogging ways, or perhaps screen-emu-ing ways, kept interrupting Blake while she was trying to film the following video:

That emu-sing display helped Emmanuel go viral in a social media sort of way. He’s made a number of re-appearance in TikTok videos such as the following where Blake had a bit of a cow over Emmauel’s antics:

However, it’s another viral incident, in this case a bad virus incidence, that has people on social media now rooting for Emmanuel in a different way. Wild geese may have brought a nasty strain of avian influenza into the Knuckle Bump Farms as Blake described on her Twitter thread:

That’s not surprising since highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), in the particular the H5N1 type A avian influenza strain, has been spreading so widely and rapidly throughout the U.S, as I have covered for Forbes previously. As of October 14, testing has found HPAI in 242 commercial flocks and 290 backyard flocks, affecting 47.45 million birds across 42 different states in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Note the words “highly pathogenic,” which aren’t positive words. If someone were to call you “highly pathogenic,” you should feel insulted. “Highly pathogenic” means highly likely to cause severe illness, which can result in death. This would be the opposite of the low pathogenic avian influenza strains that don’t really cause severe symptoms.

And unfortunately, the HPAI has done its highly pathogenic thing in the Knuckle Bump Farms, leading to lots of suffering and death, as Blake described:

Yeah, once HPAI enters a flock, a farm, or any relatively closed quarters with lots o’ birds, it can spread like wildfire. And once a bird is infected, there’s only so much you can do. You can provide supportive care as Blake indicated that she did:

But, that supportive care may not be enough, as Blake’s losing over 50 of her feathered friends showed.

This past week, Blake has thought the virus had left the barn, so to speak, but it ended up infecting Emmanuelle as well, leaving in need of round the clock care, including being fed and provided with subcutaneous fluids:

The infection didn’t just affect Emmanuel’s respiratory tract. It also resulted in neurological symptoms and loss function in his right foot and leg, according to Blake:

Thus, Blake and her teammates put Emmanuel in an improvised sling and started him on a physical therapy program.

So hopefully Emmanuelle is out of the woods and will soon return to his screen-hogging, TikTok-ing ways. Blake posted how “This entire experience, albeit very traumatizing, has taught me so much. I will always use my platform to spread awareness. To hopefully use the knowledge I’ve gained to save someone else from this heartbreak,” as you can see here:

She went on to warn that “AI is running rampant in the USA right now, please be aware!” And in this case AI didn’t stand for artificial intelligence but for avian influenza.

All of this is a reminder that avian influenza is not something to pay attention to only when you end up having to pay egg-stra to make some omelets. The virus can affect and even take the lives of many birds, in turn, affecting the humans that care for them. On top of that, it’s never a good idea to let avian influenza viruses run rampant. Like coronaviruses, influenza viruses can mutate quite a lot. This means that the genetic sequences of flu viruses can change as often as Kardashians change clothes. While the vast majority of avian influenza strains can’t infect and cause disease in humans, you never know when a new strain may emerge that has the ability to jump to humans. And you never know when a strain may have mutations that allow them to spread from human-to-human. The result could be a novel virus that could result in an outbreak. And as 2020 has shown, that’s not a great thing to have happen.