Alaska is front line vs. avian virus

USA TODAY, June, 2006 by Martin Kasindorf

Correction ran 6/21/2006: A cover story Friday about avian flu should have said that the H5N3 virus killed terns in South Africa in 1961.

BARROW, Alaska -- Within sight of an Arctic radar station built for Cold War warnings of air attacks from Soviet Siberia, government scientists are stalking birds that could be carrying a new menace from Asia: the H5N1 avian influenza virus.

Tundra swans, lesser snow geese, spectacled eiders, long-billed dowitchers, bar-tailed godwits, northern pintails, ruddy turnstones: They all come to America. Wildlife biologists don't know which of these birds, if any, will be the first to carry the killer virus from the Eastern Hemisphere over the North Pole and down the flyways to the Lower 48.

Barrow, on the icy shore of the Arctic Ocean, is the USA's northernmost settlement. Two flyways for wild birds on their spring migration from Asia cross above ...