Highly pathogenic avian influenza has reached the planet's last continent, and understanding what the H5N1 virus does there has become urgent work. A team from the Universidad de Chile's Faculty of Veterinary and Livestock Sciences, led by Víctor Neira and working in close collaboration with the Chilean Antarctic Institute, departed on 29 December for its annual Antarctic campaign, which runs until February. The mission's focus is tracking how the virus is evolving as it circulates through Antarctic wildlife.
This season's expedition carries a deliberate teaching dimension: two fourth-year veterinary students, Matthias Cabrera and Benjamín Barrera, were selected to join, continuing an inclusion of undergraduates begun in 2024. They will collect animal and environmental samples and process them in the field laboratory, with Cabrera returning for his second expedition after earlier work at Base Profesor Julio Escudero on King George Island. Few universities anywhere put undergraduates into frontline pathogen surveillance on the Antarctic Peninsula.
The programme's horizon is lengthening. The team recently won an Anillo research grant, which should expand both the fieldwork and student participation in coming seasons. The scientific stakes are considerable: Antarctica's dense seabird and marine mammal colonies offer the virus both victims and mixing vessels, and genomic surveillance from the continent feeds directly into global assessments of how H5N1 is changing and what risks those changes pose beyond the polar regions.