It’s a fatal avian flu outbreak that hasn’t happened in Indiana in six years. The flu infected a turkey farm in Dubois County, but what kind of flu is that deadly?
It’s called avian influenza H5N1 type – a highly pathogenic flu that will kills birds quickly.
Denise Spears is the Public Information Director for the Indiana State Board of Animal Health. She tells WIBC News that this particular strain of avian flu isn’t hard to spot.
“The birds quit eating, they get lethargic,” Spears explains, “they’ll get a purplish color around their head, they may have misshapen eggs if they’re laying eggs, they may die unexpectedly without explanation.”
That last symptom is what the farmer in Dubois County noticed. Around 100 of his turkeys died overnight, without explanation. The rest of the infected birds weren’t drinking the amount of water that they normally would. They became lethargic. That’s when the Indiana State Board of Animal Health got a call. The clean-up process began.
Spears describes the process, “we basically drew a circle around it [the farm] that’s 10 kilometers across, calling it the control area. So all of the commercial poultry farms in that area, and they’re are a total of 18 counting the one the that was infected, are all under quarantine and have to do regular testing before we lift the quarantine, which is going to be taking several weeks.”
The point of the quarantine period is to remove the healthy birds, infected birds and dead birds. Then the barns are thoroughly clean. Droppings are swept out, walls and floors scrubbed and temperatures are cranked up high to kill any lingering disease. Spears says the goal is to make the barns so clean, you could eat off the floor.
That leaves the other part: getting rid of the infected birds.
In total, the board counted 29,000 infected turkeys. That means they need to be killed, or “depopulated”, as Spears describes it. There are different methods to turkey “depopulation”, and all must be approved by the Indiana State Board of Animal Health, Department of Agriculture and the American Veterinarian Medical Association.
“Basically in this case, they’re using a foaming product,” Spears explains, “and basically they fill up the building with foam to a point above the turkey’s heads. It’s fairly quick euthanasia that happens there.”
It’s top priority for health officials to get these farms cleaned and get the farmers back in business. The poultry business is big in the Hoosier State.
Indiana’s poultry industry ranks third nationally in turkey production, first in duck production, second in table eggs and egg-laying chickens, and is a big producer of broiler chickens. Dubois County is the top turkey producer in the entire state. More than 14,000 Hoosiers have jobs in the bird business, which is valued at 2.5-billion-dollars.
“There’s a major economic hit here, as you can imagine, for that farmer who lost all of his birds,” Spears explains, “there’s significant cost to the clean-up, the disposal and all of that that is going to happen in addition to lost productivity since barns will be sitting empty for a number of weeks.”
Spears says many of Indiana’s business partners may even use this flu outbreak as an excuse to back out of any business deals.
“Even though, I have to note, avian influenza’s not transmitted through the meat and eggs,” says Spears, “so it’s not a food safety threat. It’s not really a significant threat when it comes to the products that are moved, however it is an opportunity for trading partners to get an advantage on a global marketplace.”
