WHAT WAS CLAIMED
No cases of bird flu have been detected in Australia.
OUR VERDICT
False. Hundreds of H5 bird flu cases have been confirmed in Australian wildlife.
AAP FACTCHECK - The rollout of bird flu vaccinations in Australia is fuelling misinformation online, including false claims that no cases of the disease have been detected in the country.
In fact, the government has confirmed hundreds of H5 bird flu infections in wildlife since the first Australian case was detected in June 2026.
The claim was made in an August 19 Facebook video by an Australian user who questions the purpose of bird flu vaccination programs.
"So just a reminder, there's been no detections of this bird flu," the user says in the post (timestamp four minutes 42 seconds).
The Facebook user also suggests birds did not have a "problem" with the flu before the development of bird flu vaccines.
"So we now look in mid-last year where they're starting to develop and test these vaccines on king penguins that have, you know, birds have been around for millions of years, never had a problem with the flu or anything," the user says (timestamp 3:05).
The claim that Australia has not detected any cases of bird flu is baseless.
Australia's first confirmed detections of the disease were announced in a June 20 federal government media release and occurred in two migratory seabirds - a brown skua and a giant petrel.
Both birds were found in an isolated area near Esperance, Western Australia, according to the media release.
The first case of bird flu in a Phillip Island little penguin was reported by ABC News on August 15 - four days before the Facebook video was posted.
The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) data dashboard lists 484 confirmed H5 bird flu events in Australian wildlife as of September 4.
The list includes several mammal species found with H5 bird flu infections, including red foxes, long-nosed fur seals and a bottlenose dolphin.
PCR tests are the primary frontline method for diagnosing avian flu, according to CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.
Scientists from CSIRO's Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness also conduct sequencing tests that provide the virus's specific genetic sequence.
"This can be compared to reference samples from other confirmed cases to give details such as the strain of the virus, where the virus is likely to be from and how it has or hasn't changed," a CSIRO spokesperson told AAP FactCheck.
In the video, the Australian Facebook user also questions the reliability of PCR tests for detecting bird flu (timestamp 4:46).
However, AAP FactCheck previously debunked similar false claims that PCR tests have no diagnostic capability to detect the virus, with experts saying they are highly accurate when used correctly.
The claim that birds have not historically been "troubled" by flu is also false.
Michael Ward, an infectious disease expert at the University of Sydney's school of veterinary science, said avian influenza had been documented for more than a century.
"Avian influenza has been reported and studied since at least the late 1800s, when it was called 'fowl plague'," Professor Ward told AAP FactCheck.
Prof Ward said the first description of avian influenza dated back to an outbreak of disease in poultry in northern Italy in 1878.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website similarly traces the first recorded case of avian influenza to northern Italy in 1878.
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