About 29,000 turkeys were euthanized this week after a strain of bird flu was detected on a commercial poultry farm in southern Indiana.
It’s the first bird flu outbreak at a commercial poultry facility in the United States since 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.
Indiana health authorities say the last such outbreak occurred in the state in 2016.
The outbreak was discovered after about 100 birds died on the farm in Dubois County, and a veterinarian took samples to the Indiana Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory at Purdue University for testing, The Indianapolis Star reported. Test results were confirmed by a USDA lab in Iowa.
“This is a foreign animal disease and shouldn’t be on our landscape,” Denise Derrer Spears, spokeswoman of the Indiana State Board of Animal Health, told The Star. “That flips the switch and makes this a big deal right off the bat, and we need to stamp it out before it gets out of control.”
State health authorities put the farm and 17 other poultry operations in a 10-mile radius under quarantine, Derrer Spears said. She estimated a few thousand birds are under quarantine.
The bodies of the 29,000 euthanized birds were composted, and the barns and equipment were thoroughly cleaned, Derrer Spears said. The state said the quarantine could last four to six weeks, The Star said.
Bird flu, also called avian flu or highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), is a viral infection spread from bird to bird. The most common kind of bird flu is the H5N1 strain.
It's mostly a threat to birds and doesn’t spread easily among people, but there was a major outbreak of bird flu in people in 2014. The very few cases of human-to-human transmission were among people with exceptionally close contact.
Migrating waterfowl -- most notably wild ducks -- are the natural carriers of bird flu viruses. Scientists suspect that infection can spread from wild fowl to domestic poultry.
The Star said the outbreak may mean the strain of bird flu has entered the Mississippi Flyway, a migratory path for birds that follows the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Isolated cases of bird flu were found in wild birds on the East Coast and in a commercial poultry operation in Nova Scotia.
Dubois County is located about 120 miles south of Indianapolis. It is the top turkey producing county in Indiana, which is the third-largest turkey-producing state in the nation, The Star said.
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29,000 Turkeys Euthanized in Indiana Bird Flu Outbreak - WebMD
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