156K chickens added to list of birds being euthanized in Indiana

Animal health officials investigating a bird flu strain that’s hit 10 turkey farms in southwestern in have added 156,000 chickens to the list of thousands of birds being euthanized due to the outbreak. APHIS noted that low-pathogenic H7 viruses, though, have been known to mutate into highly pathogenic strains, which have the potential to spread quickly and cause many deaths in domestic poultry. She told HAT that non-infected birds are being placed in landfills, “Birds that were not infected, but were depopulated as a precaution, can be moved off the farm and be placed in landfills”.

They also want to blunt the impact on the poultry industry, which suffered billions of dollars in losses in last year’s outbreak.

“We’ve had disease before and we’ve come out of it, but this is way more devastating”, Denu says.

Most turkeys at the infected farm were killed within a day, but it was 29 hours before all were dead, said Denise Derrer, spokeswoman for the Indiana State Board of Animal Health.

Dubois County’s outbreak of the avian flu has likely spread to several more farms.

The 2015 bird flu epidemic, this one involving the H5N2 strain, forced the killing of 48 million birds throughout the country. The CDC said people at greatest risk are those who have close or prolonged unprotected contact with infected birds or their environments.

North American viruses have typically posed less of a threat to humans than viruses from the Asian Avian H5N1 lineage, said Carol Cardona, an avian flu expert at the University of Minnesota. “Properly cooked eggs and poultry are safe to eat”. All affected barns will then undergo a thorough cleaning and disinfection before farmers can restock.