The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Friday confirmed the presence of highly pathogenic H7N8 avian influenza in a commercial turkey flock in Dubois County, Indiana.
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The farms, about 70 miles from Louisville, Kentucky, are within a quarantine area set up around the first farm and that area has been expanded to four neighboring IN counties – Martin, Orange, Crawford and Daviess, the Associated Press reported.
“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.
The agency says the strain (H7N8) is different than the ones that forced millions of birds to be killed during last year’s outbreak. The Indiana State Board of Animal Health says testing is underway to determine the strain of the highly-contagious virus. The index case, which houses more than 60,000 birds, was the first discovery of H7N8 in the USA, though preliminary testing is pointing to the virus being of North American lineage.
The nine new farms are located near a farm that authorities previously announced had been infected, in Dubois County.
Birds from the flock will not enter the food system. Not all the 250,000 had yet been killed, Derrer said, though she did not have specific figures. Since the outbreak a year ago, and all the lessons learned from that, there has been a lot of good work to increase our preparatory efforts at the federal side, the state side, and the industry side. It caused trade partners to stop buying USA eggs and caused the price of eggs within the U.S.to rise.
Bird flu is most commonly spread by ducks and geese.
Research has shown that wild birds’ northern migration introduced the H5N2 virus, which began to accelerate from farm to farm in the spring.
State veterinarian Bret Marsh, DVM, said in the statement that the strain was unique to in and the nation and isn’t related to the strains that struck the upper Midwest a year ago or to an outbreak last May in a backyard flock in northeastern Indiana. The USDA confirmed the incident Friday morning, prompting workers to isolate the farm and start slaughtering the birds and destroying their carcasses. “This particular case is an H7N8 virus”.
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Cooked meat and eggs do not spread the virus.
