No one has been able to figure out for sure how the H5N2 bird flu virus got into the domestic bird flock in 2015, or how it spread from farm to farm.
Advertisement
Derrer said Thursday morning that laboratories determined the strain of all ten infected farms in Dubois County was H7N8 though she said later that additional tests were being done on one of those farms. Indiana wildlife experts said that southern migration happened later than normal this year because of the mild weather, but it’s unclear “how much of a factor that has been in this”, according to Indiana Board of Animal Health spokeswoman Denise Derrer.
The first case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu, a different strain of the same avian influenza that ravaged commercial and backyard poultry flocks less than a year ago, has been confirmed in Indiana.
All 60,000 turkeys at the first farm where the bird flu was detected have been euthanised.
“We are very concerned and trying to figure out strategies to contain it”, Derrer said of the outbreak.
Last year’s multiple outbreaks of a strain called H5N2 forced the slaughter of 48 million birds and drove up egg process for months.
“There’s always the possibility of implications to human health when you see a new flu virus in animals, like we’re seeing now in turkeys”, Jhung told Reuters in an interview.
T.J. Meyers, associate deputy administrator of APHIS Veterinary, said during a news conference Friday that the infected farm was quarantined immediately after the virus was confirmed.
The U.S.is making contact with key trading partners to communicate about the outbreak. Dr. Myers said they did “quite a bit of epidemiological work”, and that there is no single factor to explain it. Economically, the 2015 bird flu epidemic cost an estimated $1 billion, with Minnesota and Iowa the most signficantly affected.
Advertisement
AI viruses are further classified by their pathogenicity (low or high) – the ability of a particular virus strain to produce disease in domestic chickens.
