Do birds play a part in Parkinson's?

A number of posts have been made to this forum suggesting that birds may play a part in the etiology of Parkinson's. I thought it would be useful for us to have references to them in one place.

Researchers, working on mice, have shown [1] that H5N1 avian flu virus causes Parkinson's like neurological damage. There's a good discussion of this in imark3000's thread [2] from 3 years ago.

There are other pathogens carried by birds, such as TB, which have been implicated in Parkinson's.

Diseases can be carried by common birds [3] such as the starling.

Thread [4] contains references to maps showing the distribution of the European Starling in the US and to the distribution of the prevalence of PD.

The European starling is not native to the US, Amy L. Nash [5] writes:
"The first attempts to introduce the European Starling to the United States from 1872 to 1890 were unsuccessful. After repeated efforts to introduce the bird, it was finally successfully brought to New York City. It was on March 16 1891, when a wealthy New Yorker with a strong passion for the birds of Shakespeare, Eugene Schieffelin, decided to import the starlings into New York City’s Central Park."

This late introduction gives us an opportunity to gauge the impact of the starling. Did its introduction have any effect on the prevalence of Parkinson's? Does anyone have historical PD prevalence figures for the US in the 1800s?


References

[1] "Establishing the Link Between Viruses and Parkinson’s Disease"
NPF, 2009.
http://www.parkinson.org/NationalPar...efa0084c18.pdf

[2] http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...ighlight=avian

[3] Influenza Other Respi Viruses. 2011 Jul;5(4):268-75. doi: 10.1111/j.1750-2659.2010.00190.x. Epub 2010 Dec 13.
"Detection of influenza viral gene in European starlings and experimental infection."
Qin Z, Clements T, Wang L, Khatri M, Pillai SP, Zhang Y, Lejeune JT, Lee CW.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21651737

[4] http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...ighlight=avian

[5] http://www.radfordpl.org/wildwood/to...n_Starling.htm

John