Over 200,000 ducks to be killed after bird flu outbreaks discovered at farms in New York and California
Bird flu is continuing to devastate populations of farmed animals in the US, as a new variant discovered this week raises further concern among scientists.
File photo of a duck farm. Credit: Stefano Belacchi / We Animals
Reports of bird flu outbreaks in US farms are mounting as the virus continues to spread throughout the country.
With each new infection, the virus has a chance of mutating and becoming more dangerous and more efficient in infecting humans.
Health authorities this week have now announced the discovery of a new strain of bird flu present in poultry on a farm in Merced county, California. The farm has already lost almost 119,000 birds since last month, with birds infected with both the more common H5N1 strain and the newly discovered H5N9 strain.
“This is the first confirmed case of HPAI H5N9 in poultry in the United States,” the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement.
The new variant is the latest sign that shows the virus is showing no signs of slowing down and also further raises concerns of the possibility of the virus mutating into one which can spread through human-to-human transmission.
A file photo of a duck farm. Credit: Pierre Parcoeur / We Animals
Bird flu has become so widespread in the country that it has already jumped from birds to other farmed animals including pigs and cows.
The USDA announced in October last year that it had detected the virus in a pig for the first time, while nearly 1,000 dairy herds have reported outbreaks in their cattle. This has led to some animal-based products testing positive for the virus, including samples of pasteurized milk on grocery store shelves still harbouring remnants of the bird flu virus from infected dairy cows.
As well as impacting the national food supply, the virus causes a catastrophic number of animal deaths.
The virus has been detected in dairy herds across the US.
When the virus is detected on a farm, all of the animals in the herd are typically euthanized using painful mass-killing methods in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading further. These methods can include filling barns with CO2 so that animals suffocate, or heating them to death in a process commonly known as ventilation shutdown.
This can result in entire flocks being culled. Last week, a duck farm in Long Island, New York, reported that it would cull more than 100,000 ducks after bird flu was detected among the animals.
Shockingly, this staggering number is just one of many. According to figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 156 million poultry have been affected by the current H5 strain.
The CDC says that while the current public health risk is low, it is “watching the situation carefully”. So far in the US, there have been 67 human cases of bird flu, and one person has died.
For more on bird flu and its impact, check out our long read: “Could the bird flu virus become the next global pandemic?”.
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