The next month the ornithologists documented a temporary increase around Chicago. In March, the disease expanded rapidly to the South and Northeast. Caused by a new strain of the well-known poultry disease, Mycoplasma gallisepticum, house finch conjunctivitis will not infect humans, but its effect on poultry and other birds is less certain, according to George V. Kollias, D.V.M., Ph.D., professor of wildlife medicine at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine. In Ontario, Canada, where wild and domestic breeding flocks of turkeys are free of M. gallisepticum, Cornell's volunteers were the first to alert authorities of diseased finches in that province. Research plans call for testing the disease organism in finches from a more genetically diverse population in the western United States, where birds now known as Eastern house finches originated some 50 years ago, as well as those in a geographically restricted population, such as finches in the Hawaiian Islands.
Birds are a particular puzzle because they are much more mobile.
Compared to a disease like wildlife rabies, which spreads in raccoons at about 25 miles a year, a bird disease can jump hundreds or even thousands of miles in a single season, he said.