Hackensack Meridian Health Tracking Viruses as Dead Wild Birds a Concern

On Feb 23, 2026

With some 1,100 wild birds found dead across multiple counties last week, stoking concerns about avian flu, state authorities have said testing is not conclusive – but a virus could be the cause.

Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) has taken proactive steps to monitor and mitigate the potential risk to public health with the rise of any such viruses across most of the Garden State, including and beyond the seasonal flu strains.

“We don’t just ignore these things – we take them seriously,” said David Perlin, Ph.D., chief scientific officer and executive vice president of HMH’s Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) .

Researchers at the CDI have developed the capacity to rapidly sequence and test for the virus, including emerging mutations. This advanced testing is deployed within HMH hospitals, when patients present with influenza symptoms and testing finds it is not one of the common seasonal flu strains. This sequencing allows for greater understanding and tracking of the avian flu and its ongoing mutations.

Perlin said several factors are at play here:

• It’s not unusual to have birds die of a viral infection.
• The issue is whether it takes a potential cross-species jump.
• In principle, if it is a virus, it could make the cross-species jump. This is what likely happened with the pandemic flu in 2009, in Mexico or Southern California.
• But it’s statistically unlikely – if it is influenza – to make the jump from wild birds to humans at this point in time.
• Yet the CDI can and does look for any uncommon strains or viral cases among HMH hospitals on an ongoing basis.
• Just this season the CDI assessed several cases, but they turned out to be nothing truly alarming.
• ‘When we see something uncommon, we do deeper dives.”

The next step: for the state testing to come back and inform health partners what the cause of the bird deaths was, said Perlin.

CDI was previously instrumental during the COVID-19 pandemic, developing its own test for COVID with results within two hours enabling our hospitals to better triage and help severely ill patients, when most of the country was sending tests to Washington, D.C. and waiting days for confirmation of the virus.

Bird flu is widespread in wild birds around the world, and has caused outbreaks in poultry and dairy cows in the United States. There have been some instances of farmers with direct contact with infected animals becoming infected, and at least one person has died from bird flu in the U.S.

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