This deadly bird virus just hit India for the first time. Is your pet safe?

A deadly avian pathogen has been detected in India for the very first time. A team of veterinary scientists recently identified and genetically mapped Parrot Bornavirus 4 (PaBV-4), a highly contagious virus that triggers a fatal wasting illness in captive parrots, macaws, and related species. The discovery exposes a major hidden threat to the country’s exotic pet industry and international wildlife conservation initiatives.Unmasking a threatA team of researchers led by Pankaj Deka and Sangeeta Das from the Assam Veterinary and Fishery University in Guwahati worked with other experts from Assam and Gujarat to get to the bottom of a big problem. They wrote about what they found in the journal Scientific Reports. The study says that a certain virus is the cause of Proventricular Dilatation Disease or PDD which is a terrible condition that hurts a bird’s nervous system and stops its digestive organs from working. The team collected samples from 83 birds, including parakeets, lovebirds, budgies and cockatoos, over four years from 2020 to 2024. They got these samples from public aviaries in Assam, West Bengal and Karnataka. They were especially interested in exotic birds like African grey parrots, yellow-collared macaws and rainbow lorikeets.Silent spreaders in the cageThe researchers put the birds into three groups to see if they could find the virus. They looked at birds that were already sick, birds that seemed healthy but lived with birds and birds that had already died from PDD. They took samples from the birds and from the brains and digestive systems of the dead birds.What they found was really surprising. Almost half of the birds they tested, 44 out of 83, had the virus. The important thing they learned was that the disease can be hiding in birds that look perfectly healthy. They found the virus in 88% of the birds that had died but they also found it in 19% of the birds that seemed fine. This means that birds that look healthy can actually be carrying the disease and spreading it to birds in the aviary without anyone knowing.Footprint of global wildlife tradeGenetic sequencing confirmed that the Indian samples consist entirely of the PaBV-4 strain, identical to versions previously documented in the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. Interestingly, the researchers found no genetic variations linking the virus to specific geographic regions within India or to particular bird species. The scientists note that this uniform genetic profile is a direct reflection of the global commercial bird trade. The virus is almost certainly moving across international borders through the legal and illegal transport of captive-bred birds. Because several of the infected species are currently categorized as near-threatened or endangered, experts warn that this outbreak poses a severe bottleneck for captive breeding programs trying to save vulnerable populations from extinction.