Interior of chicken farm with many white chickens
Pennsylvania is the epicenter for nation’s worst avian flu epidemic
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Scott LaMar
Interior of chicken farm with many white chickens
Airdate: March 27th, 2023
Avian influenza that infects chickens, turkeys, ducks and other birds is rampant across the country. In fact, the current outbreak is now the largest avian flu epidemic the nation has ever seen. Pennsylvania has the most cases with the majority of those coming in our region.
It’s one of the reasons the cost of eggs has gone up so much, but it has had a devastating impact on poultry flocks and farms.
Philip Gruber, the News Editor for the Lancaster Farming newspaper has written extensively about avian flu and was with us on The Spark Monday.
Gruber said avian flu has been detected in 47 states and discussed why it has been so widespread,”This is an unusually virulent strain of avian influenza. So it has been it’s been hard on wild birds, unusually. And it has also it’s also spread across several migratory bird pathways in the United States instead of being more confined to just one.”
In fact, that’s how avian flu is spread — through wild birds and their feces that is then transported into chicken houses or other places where poultry animals are.
Pennsylvania has been hit hard as Gruber pointed out,”The first outbreak in Pennsylvania of this current outbreak was last April, April 2022. And since then we have had 4.6 million birds lost across 67 premises. We have had the most lost so far in the past month or so, not necessarily across the entire outbreak, but we’ve had 32 premises affected. 300,000 birds across February and March.”
Flocks that have infected with avian flu are destroyed. Gruber explained why,”That’s a federal policy. Avian influenza is considered a foreign animal disease. So the prescribed response is called stamping out. Which means all of the birds on the farm would have to be killed. I mean, you don’t The main thing is you don’t want such a high consequence disease to become endemic and to cause problems over such a long period of time. The other thing is chickens just don’t have natural immunity to avian influenza. So if it’s if it’s in their house, it’s pretty likely they’re going to die anyways. And if we can do euthanasia or something similar to that, then that’s a better death. Veterinarians would say, rather than having them go through the agony of avian influenza.”
Gruber was asked what steps are taken to fight avian flu,”in the industry, the term is biosecurity. That’s the main way we do this, which means making sure that what’s dirty stays out of the clean, which is the area where the birds are. And that means changing your shoes. Making sure whatever goes into the poultry area. Is not going to be contaminated, cleaning up feed spills and things. So you don’t attract wild birds. You know, bio security is not 100% effective, but that’s our main tool.”
