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US on guard against bird flu
20/11/2005 10:19 - (SA)
Bristol, Illinois - With the last of his turkeys slaughtered and ready for Thanksgiving, Rick Undesser has begun the tedious task of sanitizing his farm.
Pens are swept clean. Floors are scrubbed. Cages are bleached. Even the trucks get a wash.
It's a ritual he goes through three times in spring and once in winter to make sure that each new batch of turkey chicks can't be infected by the ones that came before.
And it's just one in a long line of defences US poultry farmers have taken to protect their flocks from threats like the deadly avian influenza currently spreading across Asia and Europe.
While the bio security measures promoted and enforced by the United States Department of Agriculture have not eliminated the possibility that the deadly avian flu will reach North America, they have greatly reduced the opportunity for the disease to spread among flocks, said Ron DeHaven, the administrator of the USDA's animal and plant health inspection service.
"We have a number of safeguards in place to keep it from getting here and if it does we have a number of safeguards in place," he said in a telephone interview.
The US has imposed an import ban on all poultry products from countries in which the virus is present and has increased its surveillance to catch smugglers. Birds imported from countries currently free of the disease must be tested and submitted to a 30-day quarantine.
Wild flocks throughout the country are being monitored for infection and a surveillance program has been established in Alaska where migratory flocks from Asia mingle with those from the Pacific coast.
"If you find the virus in migratory birds you can't effectively control the virus, but they do provide and effective sentry or early warning system," DeHaven said.
The USDA and poultry farmers also conduct about 1.5 million tests of commercial birds, a number that will soon increase to 4 million tests a year once a program proposed prior the Asian outbreak is fully implemented, DeHaven said.
The USDA has also been actively promoting its voluntary bio security guidelines which encourage farmers to protect their flocks by: keeping them in closed barns where they cannot come into contact with wild birds or their dropping; ensuring that all feed and water is kept and transported in closed containers that cannot be infected by contaminated soil or dropping; cleaning and disinfecting all cages and equipment that have come into contact with outside flocks; permitting only essential vehicles and workers from entering the farm; cleaning all boots, clothing and tires prior to reentering the farm.
While there are thousands of small farms in the United States where poultry is essentially kept in the back yard, the bulk of the country's commercial farms are massive operations of anywhere from 10 000 to a million birds which operate closed facilities. It's in their economic best-interest to protect the flock from infection because if one bird gets sick the entire flock must be destroyed.
Even if the virus were to reach the United States, the opportunity for human infection is very low because American farmers, unlike their Asian counterparts who often keep poultry in their homes, rarely come into close contact with their birds.
The impact on exports and the global supply of poultry, however, could be devastating. The United States is the world's largest exporter of poultry. In 2003, the US exported 38.5 billion pounds of poultry valued at $23.3bn.
"The key is early detection and rapid response. We saw that in 2004 with the outbreak (of Exotic Newcastle Disease) in Texas which only affected one flock," DeHaven said, adding that the USDA has a flu vaccine bank of 40 million doses and is aiming to more than double it.
While the US was able to convince many of its trading partners to only impose a ban on poultry imports from Texas during that limited outbreak, it may have a harder time if this particular strain of bird flu reaches its shores.
The big question is whether the virus will mutate so that it can spread between humans, instead of merely from bird to human. At that point, the US will have to expand its monitoring system beyond the birds and there's no way of telling how it will strike first.
"We all hesitate to make any predictions because we simply don't know,"
DeHaven said. "It's a situation where you hope for the best and prepare for the worst."
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