Commonground
Senior Moderator
February 26, 2025
Excerpts:
To make sense of the latest developments, we consulted Matt Koci, a virus expert and professor with NC State University’s Prestage Department of Poultry Science, who keeps a close eye on avian flu.
What are the latest developments with avian flu in poultry?
The big change, which has been true for the last couple of years now, is that avian flu is sort of here to stay, and it’s become more of an ever-present threat and danger to poultry. That danger increases at different times of the year, but it doesn’t go back to zero like it used to. Avian flu outbreaks may be associated with migratory patterns in birds, but now the virus seems to be established in wild birds that live in the U.S., including North Carolina. There were reports just last week of a great horned owl in Wake County found dead with bird flu. There’s a greater risk year-round that it’s going to end up in a poultry house because it’s in wild birds locally, not just birds that happen to be transiting through during migration season. That’s different from what we saw in 2015 and even 2021 when outbreaks happened, but after bird migration, cases would go away and things would go back to normal. Around 2022, avian flu cases decreased but never went away in all of the states.
The poultry industry is adapting to the evolving threat. But until just recently, what we always told poultry producers and farmers and the public was that avian flu was going to get introduced through migratory waterfowl — ducks, geese and other birds as they flew over. And so biosecurity and what people did to keep wild birds away from poultry focused on migratory waterfowl. Now that avian flu is in local wild birds, there may be more birds that farmers need to be aware of. The way H5N1 may get into a poultry house is probably changing, and so farmers are having to adapt to that as well.
-snip-
What’s the significance of finding a new strain of H5N1 in dairy cows? Should we be concerned?
Continued: https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/avian-flu-how-scientists-and-farmers-are-working-to-adapt/
Excerpts:
To make sense of the latest developments, we consulted Matt Koci, a virus expert and professor with NC State University’s Prestage Department of Poultry Science, who keeps a close eye on avian flu.
What are the latest developments with avian flu in poultry?
The big change, which has been true for the last couple of years now, is that avian flu is sort of here to stay, and it’s become more of an ever-present threat and danger to poultry. That danger increases at different times of the year, but it doesn’t go back to zero like it used to. Avian flu outbreaks may be associated with migratory patterns in birds, but now the virus seems to be established in wild birds that live in the U.S., including North Carolina. There were reports just last week of a great horned owl in Wake County found dead with bird flu. There’s a greater risk year-round that it’s going to end up in a poultry house because it’s in wild birds locally, not just birds that happen to be transiting through during migration season. That’s different from what we saw in 2015 and even 2021 when outbreaks happened, but after bird migration, cases would go away and things would go back to normal. Around 2022, avian flu cases decreased but never went away in all of the states.
The poultry industry is adapting to the evolving threat. But until just recently, what we always told poultry producers and farmers and the public was that avian flu was going to get introduced through migratory waterfowl — ducks, geese and other birds as they flew over. And so biosecurity and what people did to keep wild birds away from poultry focused on migratory waterfowl. Now that avian flu is in local wild birds, there may be more birds that farmers need to be aware of. The way H5N1 may get into a poultry house is probably changing, and so farmers are having to adapt to that as well.
-snip-
What’s the significance of finding a new strain of H5N1 in dairy cows? Should we be concerned?
Continued: https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/avian-flu-how-scientists-and-farmers-are-working-to-adapt/