The nine farms are located in Dubois County, Indiana, about 70 miles from Louisville, Kentucky, the Indiana State Board of Animal Health said in a statement. Testing is now ongoing at the National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Ames, Iowa, to determine the pathogenicity of these new cases.
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“I can’t say it’s our worst nightmare, but it’s pretty close to it”, Derrer said Friday, adding that there is a quarantine in place for commercial poultry farms and backyard flocks within a almost 6-mile radius. Not all the 250,000 had yet been killed, said Derrer, though she didn’t have specific figures.
“They want to make sure it is not being spread”, she said.
“This could have a major, major economic impact on so many people in Dubois County because we are so active in Dubois County in the turkey and chicken business”, Dubois County Council President Greg Kendall told Hoosier Ag Today. One of the nine farms has 12,000 turkeys and another 23,500.
Avian flu arrived in the U.S.in 2015 via migratory birds, but how it is spread to birds inside confined barns continues to be a topic of research for poultry officials and farmers. It caused trade partners to stop buying USA eggs and caused the price of eggs within the U.S.to rise.
He confirmed that APHIS and the Indiana BOAH are handling the depopulation of the remaining birds in the affected flock. “There’s no single thing that you can point to that is the one and only factor that explains this”, Myers said.
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There are no known cases of H7N8 infections in humans, but as a precaution, the USDA recommends cooking poultry and eggs to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The tests came back positive for H7N8 avian flu. Epidemiologists are not certain why the virus would surface during the winter months, either, although officials say it can surface at any time. The highly pathogenic H7N8 virus has not yet been found in wild birds, suggesting that the virus could have developed in wild birds that spent the winter in southern Indiana, USDA spokeswoman Andrea McNally said Friday.
