Biodetection of low pathogenic avian influenza virus (LPAIV) infected mallards data set

Outbreaks of avian influenza virus (AIV) infection included the spread of highly pathogenic AIV in commercial poultry and backyard flocks in the spring of 2015. This resulted in estimated losses of more than $8.5 million from federal government expenditures, $1.6 billion from direct losses to produces arising from destroyed turkey and chicken egg production, and economy-wide indirect costs of $3.3 billion from impacts on retailers and the food service industries. Additionally, these outbreaks resulted in the death or depopulation of nearly 50 million domestic birds. Domesticated male ferrets (Mustela putorius furo) were trained to display a specific conditioned behavior (i.e. active scratch alert) in response to feces from AIV-infected mallards in comparison to feces from healthy ducks. In order to establish that ferrets were identifying samples based on odors associated with infection, additional experiments controlled for potentially confounding effects, such as: individual duck identity, housing and feed, inoculation concentration, and day of sample collection (post-infection). A final experiment revealed that trained ferrets could detect AIV infection status even in the presence of samples from mallards inoculated with Newcastle disease virus or infectious laryngotracheitis virus. The data included covers the training with live AIV fecal samples, testing with alternate but similar pathogens, and generalization testing with fecal samples from ducks pre and post infection.
We hypothesized that the success of the ferrets in detecting AIV infection in irradiated mallard fecal samples could be repeated using fecal samples from live AIV infected and non-infected ducks. We also conducted experiments that tried to control for diet, location, collection day, and infection from other viruses.
For more information about this study and these data, see Golden et al. (2021).