Regina Leader-Post

Entire flocks set to be culled due to the avian flu

140,000 birds at commercial farms

- ZAK VESCERA zvescera@postmedia.com

Tens of thousands of Saskatchew­an poultry will meet an untimely end after a highly contagious avian flu infiltrate­d their farms.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had found the flu on six farms as of Friday, including four commercial operations, meaning an estimated 140,000 exposed poultry have or will need to be purged to halt the virus's rapid spread.

The seventh location is described as a “non-poultry” location, meaning a bird kept for use within a household or for purposes other than gathering meat or eggs.

It is part of a larger surge of avian flu that Dr. Noel Ritson-bennett said has spread across Canada with alarming speed.

“It's really thrown everybody for a bit of a loop,” said Ritson-bennett, the CFIA'S veterinary program manager for Western Canada. “I never would have envisioned, based upon our previous experience,

an outbreak of this size.”

He said previous cases of avian flu were often localized: a single operation, for example, reported cases in Saskatchew­an in 2007. It never appeared anywhere else and the province's barns have since been free of it, until now.

Ritson-bennett said 31 premises across Western Canada have detected the highly pathogenic avian flu since early April. It's a strain of the virus that has long circulated in Asia and Europe and recently made its way to North America, where it has spread rapidly among wild birds, which then transmit it to poultry raised for eggs or meat.

Ritson-bennet said the risk to humans is “really very low.” Food producers and the federal government say there is no risk to people eating eggs or poultry.

Dion Martens, executive director of Saskatchew­an Egg Producers, wrote in a prepared statement that outbreaks are “not affecting the supply of eggs in Saskatchew­an” and that such products are “fresh, safe and nutritious to eat.”

Infections in humans are also very rare, and generally only occur when someone is exposed to infected birds or their environmen­t for an extended period of time.

That's not the case for birds. The flu is so contagious that the CFIA'S policy is that all poultry in an affected facility have to be “humanely destroyed,” usually by pumping carbon dioxide gas into a sealed barn to slowly kill them.

Ritson-bennett said it can be a hard experience for staff and farmers.

“It's a tremendous impact on their livelihood. There is no doubt it is severely stressful. It has huge consequenc­es for producers.” The CFIA compensate­s farmers for animals it orders destroyed, he added.

The agency tries to limit the spread of the flu through surveillan­ce, encouragin­g farmers to keep the virus out of their barns and controllin­g movement of commercial poultry. The CFIA has created four “infection zones” in Saskatchew­an around affected farms where people can't bring commercial birds in or out.

The agency can do little to limit wild birds, which are believed to be the primary vector of the flu's spread.

Conservati­onists say the flu has been found in every species, from geese to magpies to crows, since the start of the month.

 ?? ?? Dion Martens
Dion Martens

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada