Via the North Shore News: Bird flu leads to B.C. turkey shortage. Excerpt:
Christmas dinner in British Columbia could look a little different this year as nearly two dozen farms across the province slaughter hundreds of thousands of birds in an attempt to contain the avian influenza virus.
From the Interior, to the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has identified high-pathogenic strains (HPAI) of H5N1 — the most deadly variety of avian influenza or “bird flu”— in 42 B.C. flocks. As of Wednesday afternoon, 23 outbreaks were ongoing and 275,800 birds had been slaughtered in an effort to contain the pathogen.
The culled birds include broiler chickens, ducks and laying hens, among other specialty birds. But the most heavily affected poultry has been turkey, says Amanda Brittain, chief information officer for the BC Poultry Association, the group that helps coordinate the province’s four poultry and egg marketing boards during emergencies.
“The BC Turkey Marketing Board tells me that they’re looking to be 20 per cent short of how much they grow,” said Brittain. “Turkeys grow for 13 to 15 weeks, so there is no time to grow more before Christmas.”
H5N1 has been identified at over 220 locations across Canada and led to the culling of 3.7 million birds since the start of the latest epidemic.
The seven commercial Fraser Valley poultry farms hit with the virus since Nov. 16 have come under “intense disease pressure,” said B.C. Minister of Agriculture Lana Popham.
From the wild to the farm
The outbreaks in Chilliwack and Abbotsford come out of step with the seasonal migration of wild birds, which have been found to carry and pass on the virus to domestic flocks.
"The virus this year is different than we've ever seen in the past and it is behaving differently in both wild birds and domestic birds," said Brittain.
Scientists have isolated variants of the influenza virus in more than 100 wild bird species worldwide, from waterfowl like geese, swans, ducks and gulls to shoreline species like sandpipers, plovers and storks. Not all strains are deadly. In the same way that many humans pull through an annual bout of the flu, many strains of the avian varieties rarely cause more than the sniffles, lethargy or fever in birds.
High-pathogenic strains are different. When HPAIs enter a poultry farm, they often find the epidemiological equivalent of a refugee camp for birds, says Ronald Ydenberg, a professor of behavioural ecology and director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Wildlife Ecology.
“There are thousands of birds there. They're all immunologically naive. They haven't had time to evolve any resistance. And there's a fresh batch every six weeks,” he told Glacier Media last spring.
