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\n350,000 dead birds \u2014 and counting<\/p>\nWhen a poultry farm tests positive, owners must euthanize every chicken, duck or turkey at the site to prevent spread of a virus that is highly transmissible and often lethal in birds. So far this season, Sonoma County farmers have had to kill more than 350,000 birds.<\/p>\n
Weber said the quick response and tight biosecurity measures adopted by local producers give him hope the virus can be contained. But Phil Reichardt, the duck farm\u2019s owner, told The Press Democrat the same thing Nov. 3; two additional facilities were infected shortly after.<\/p>\n
The reality is that avian flu is so prevalent in migratory wild birds, and so easily inhaled by domesticated flocks, that no farm is truly safe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a lot of sympathy and empathy for our county producers. We don\u2019t want to see them go through this,\u201d said Andrew Smith, the Sonoma County agricultural commissioner. \u201cAnd you know there\u2019s little you can do as a bureaucrat to make it all go away. I think that\u2019s what hurts the most.\u201d<\/p>\n
Positive tests trigger hurried rounds of communication among farmers, Smith\u2019s office, the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the USDA.<\/p>\n
Business owners are responsible for the euthanasia, in consultation with the state. As of Friday, Weber said, that somber work had been completed at all three impacted sites.<\/p>\n
Sonoma County officials aren\u2019t mandating\u00a0additional safety measures at this point, Smith said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all about really strict adherence to biosecurity protocols,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I were to say anything, it would be, \u2018Don\u2019t share employees, and don\u2019t share equipment, to the degree you can. And be sure you\u2019re advising your staff on their own health.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
HPAI has shown an ability to jump across species \u2014 to cattle and, less commonly, to humans.<\/p>\n
Nationwide, at least 70 people have contracted HPAI since 2022, one fatally, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In California, 38 cases have been confirmed \u2014 36 linked to dairy farms and two of unknown origin.<\/p>\n
No Sonoma County dairy farms have suffered an avian flu outbreak, Smith said. He credited \u201cbetter isolation and better insulation,\u201d with less crowding of cows and less swapping of calves or pieces of equipment between facilities.<\/p>\n
If the recent outbreaks haven\u2019t altered local government policy, they\u2019ve certainly pushed farmers into a higher gear.<\/p>\n
Weber said he and his brother, Scott, have shut down their operations to casual visitors. Only employees and truck drivers delivering feed or picking up eggs are allowed on site. Every staff member just got a clean pair of $100 boots. Employees\u00a0check the laying houses for mortality every morning and evening.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have two truck washes set up at our farms,\u201d Weber said. \u201cAn employee is stationed there, to make sure every car that comes in is logged. And then they\u2019re personally disinfecting it. Everyone\u2019s pickup smells like a disinfectant wash.\u201d<\/p>\n
The vaccine debate<\/p>\n
Researcher Maurice Pitesky praises the industry\u2019s biosecurity efforts but says they should extend\u00a0beyond individual farms, since migrating waterfowl feed up to 2 miles\u00a0or more from their nesting areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the USDA and CDFA should be doing, if there are 600 farms in the Central Valley, ultimately you want to understand which have the highest abundance of waterfowl around them,\u201d said Pitesky, an associate professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine-Cooperative Extension. \u201cYou can kind of circle which farms have lagoons or dairies or rice farms around them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pitesky has created an interactive data tool, the WaterFowl Alert Network, that shows waterfowl density in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. (The radar technology on which it\u2019s based doesn\u2019t work for the North Bay.) Starting in fall, he said, \u201cthe projections change daily. It\u2019s a dynamic reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
When interviewed two weeks ago, Reichardt took polite exception to rules requiring culling every bird at an affected farm. He argued that removing sick or dead animals and isolating healthy ones could potentially save million of birds.<\/p>\n
With cases spreading again \u2014 and an estimated 183 million farm birds dead or culled nationwide since 2022 \u2014 farmers and researchers are also reviving a long-simmering question: whether it\u2019s time to vaccinate poultry against avian flu.<\/p>\n
Pharmaceutical companies have worked on a vaccine for more than 20 years, and France\u00a0launched a pilot program in 2023. But the shots are prohibited in the United States because tests can\u2019t always distinguish between an infected bird and a vaccinated one.<\/p>\n
Weber said the policy was enacted to protect poultry exports \u2014 but producers like Sunrise Farms rarely sell abroad. He believes it\u2019s time for the federal government to allow vaccination.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe research shows it\u2019s working,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s an animal welfare issue. Protecting these animals is our job. Denying that vaccine is horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
A divide has emerged within the poultry industry, Pitesky said. Egg farmers, who don\u2019t rely much on exports and have been hit hardest by the HPAI pandemic, tend to support vaccination. Farmers who raise birds for meat \u2014 known as broilers \u2014 export more and have been impacted less, and generally oppose it.<\/p>\n
Pitesky has concerns of his own. Vaccines protect against the development of disease, not initial infection. That means inoculated birds could become asymptomatic carriers. More than that, he said, there\u2019s still no clear national vaccination strategy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have hundreds of millions of egg layers every year, no one can possibly vaccinate all those birds,\u201d Pitesky said. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna vaccinate where the risk is elevated.\u201d<\/p>\n
As of early November, no place carries more of that risk than Sonoma County.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first tastes of wintry weather have brought an ominous feeling back to Sonoma County\u2019s poultry producers. At…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[150891,68087,141173,150885,3134,150881,150890,150882,150880,150886,97,141174,10649,150889,150893,150887,150876,150888,150879,150884,141175,5414,150892,150877,72332,12839,150883,150878,138875],"class_list":["post-286365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-andrew-smith","tag-animal-health","tag-avian-flu","tag-bird-culling","tag-bird-flu","tag-california-agriculture","tag-california-department-of-food-and-agriculture","tag-cdfa","tag-egg-farms","tag-farm-biosecurity","tag-health","tag-hpai","tag-infectious-disease","tag-maurice-pitesky","tag-north-bay-farming","tag-perdue-farms","tag-petaluma","tag-petaluma-poultry","tag-poultry-farms","tag-poultry-vaccination","tag-reichardt-duck-farm","tag-sonoma-county","tag-sonoma-county-agricultural-commissioner","tag-sunrise-farms","tag-uc-davis","tag-usda","tag-vaccine-debate","tag-weber-family-farms","tag-zoonotic-disease"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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