A new mystery disease among animals that people are interacting with isn’t ominously scary at all.

Please enforce bird social distancing by closing bird restaurants

Excerpt from an email chain one of my profs forwarded to the vet school mailing list:

I wrote the letter that was attached to the email string (attaching it again here). Cases have now been seen from KY and TN up through NJ and PA, and as far west as OH and IN. Possible report of related cases in FL, but not confirmed. The epicenter is definitely D.C., with most of the cases coming in from there. It's only affected nestlings and fledglings, and cases have gone to multiple state labs as well as SCWDS, NWHC, and our lab at UPENN. We've found some bacteria in some cases, but not consistently enough to say that is the cause. We've also found pesticides in some, but it's mostly dieldrin, heptachlor, chlordane and trans arachlor, which have essentially been banned since the 1980's, so we're probably just picking up environmental background contamination. Tests are still on-going...no single smoking gun yet!

Cases are starting to slack off further south, and just picking up in N. PA and NJ, so it could be "moving" with the age of the birds (birds further south have fledged and are no longer susceptible???). It will be interesting to see if we experience a second wave as the next round of baby birds comes in...

That's about all I can tell you. We've been having weekly calls with USGS NWHC and the state agencies that are involved so far. They are working on another press release that will probably go out on Monday.

This isn't just the DC area anymore, it's spreading across the east coast.

I might recommend North Americans preemptively removing bird feeders even if you're outside the currently described range.