State officials are confirming a suspected outbreak of avian flu among chickens at a large commercial egg farm in Weld County, with the governor\u2019s office declaring a disaster after a year of relative quiet with the deadly and highly contagious bird disease.<\/p>\n
Under state orders, Colorado commercial egg farms have had to kill millions of chickens at a time to head off avian flu outbreaks spreading to other farms and wild bird populations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera, acting as governor with Gov. Jared Polis in Washington, D.C., issued a verbal disaster declaration for the Weld County outbreak. Colorado Agriculture Department officials said Friday that Colorado State University had confirmed the new outbreak, but that the state waits for lab confirmation from another source at U.S. Department of Agriculture facilities in Iowa.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working with a producer, getting ready for a response, but we will not do anything until we get that (national) confirmation, which we\u2019re expecting later today,\u201d said Colorado Agriculture Department spokesperson Olga Robak, in an interview.<\/p>\n
A disaster declaration \u201cenables state agencies to continue to properly coordinate for mitigation of disease spread, response, consequence management, and recovery efforts,\u201d the governor\u2019s office said. Polis is negotiating Colorado River rights and drought response with other state and national officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the first commercial farm outbreak of avian flu detected since mid-2024, Robak said. Last year \u201cwas a pretty slow detection year. But here in 2026, this is the fourth one,\u201d Robak said. Three of those have been backyard bird detections.\u00a0After Colorado egg and poultry farms killed millions of chickens to contain outbreaks earlier in the 2020s, the state\u2019s agriculture sector also suffered the nation\u2019s worst crossover of avian flu into dairy herds.<\/a> In July of 2024, Colorado had identified<\/a> 26 herds with cases of avian influenza.<\/p>\n Since 2024\u2019s outbreaks, Colorado officials have monitored poultry and dairy workers carefully for any potential human crossover of avian flu, though it\u2019s extremely rare. A few workers did test positive in 2024. They were responding to an outbreak of bird flu at a commercial egg-laying operation in Weld County, where\u00a0nearly 1.8 million chickens were being culled<\/a>\u00a0following the virus\u2019s discovery. <\/p>\n None of the workers required hospitalization. Their symptoms ranged from pink eye to what the state described in a news release as \u201ccommon respiratory infection symptoms.\u201d<\/p>\n Type of Story: News<\/p>\n Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"State officials are confirming a suspected outbreak of avian flu among chickens at a large commercial egg farm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[141173,97,122122],"class_list":["post-441650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-avian-flu","tag-health","tag-weld-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441650","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=441650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}