COURTLAND — As Terri Anderson collected eggs from some of her 100 laying hens on a recent morning, she talked of bird flu fears, the onslaught of large production farms and the desire of Americans to try and control everything around them.

“I don’t want to (downplay) the threat of bird flu to humans, but we should realize that there’s no way to stop the spread of a virus, whatever it is. You can slow it down, but you can’t stop it,” said Anderson, who operates Valley Veggies, an organic farm west of Mankato off Highway 68.

Anderson feels unfairly besieged by officials who suggest that free-roaming chickens are at greater risk of getting and spreading deadly flu virus than large corporate farms, where turkeys and chickens don’t have contact with wild birds.

“My opinion is when you keep animals indoors, it’s wrong. Anytime you put animals or people indoors with no sunshine, fresh air or exercise, you compromise their immune systems. There are more diseases.”

The corporate farm versus free range argument aside, everyone raising fowl is thinking about bird flu.

Plans in place

If deadly bird flu shows up in America, officials think they have plans to quickly identify and contain it.

State and federal agencies, turkey and chicken growing associations, universities and others have for months been intensifying efforts to track wild birds flying from Alaska for signs of the flu strain, setting up plans for destroying barns full of turkeys or chickens if the disease is detected in a flock, and getting word out to small producers to monitor their flocks.

“This is something we’re used to dealing with,” said Steve Olson, executive director of the Minnesota Turkey Growers and Broiler and Egg Association. “We’ve had a surveillance program looking for avian flu for more than 30 years.”

Indeed, bird flu has always been around. There are some 145 strains of it that affect wild and domestic birds, often causing no danger even to the birds carrying the virus.

But it is the virulent strain — H5N1 — that is spreading through Asia, Europe and Africa that is worrying officials. It has killed hundreds of millions of birds and 110 people who have had close contact with infected birds.

The greatest concern for public health officials is that the virus could mutate and jump from human to human, something that would create a flu pandemic with the potential to last for years and kill millions of people.

Early detection

For now, the plan has been to focus on detecting the strain if it gets to the United States and to quickly contain it to keep it from spreading to more birds.

Michelle Powell, a Department of Natural Resources wildlife disease specialist, is working with federal and other state agencies to monitor wild birds for the disease.

Mallards, pintail, green-winged teal and lesser scaup are the four ducks most likely to carry the disease with geese and shore birds a less likely risk.

“We hope to sample 1,000 birds in Minnesota this summer,” Powell said. The birds don’t need to be killed to be tested. Swabs of fecal matter are collected and tested. Powell said most of the tests will be done on ducks that are caught as part of ongoing banding programs in Minnesota in which steel bands are put on their legs for research purposes.

Federal officials are likely to do testing of birds in the state as well.

Powell said the DNR does not anticipate asking waterfowl hunters to do anything different this fall because of the bird flu fears. “Just the normal things you should do anyway, like wearing gloves when you’re cleaning them and cooking them right,” Powell said. “It takes pretty extreme exposure to get flu from a bird.”

Federal officials are focusing on testing birds coming from Alaska. Migratory birds from Asia fly through Alaska and then down through North America.

Watching the flocks

While officials wait to see if the deadly flu shows up in wild birds, they have set plans to protect domestic bird flocks.

Small flocks, agriculture officials say, are more likely to come in contact with wild birds than those in large enclosed barns. They are telling people to feed their chickens under a roof to keep wild birds away from the food. People are also encouraged to watch birds for signs of sickness — lack of appetite, purple wattles, combs and legs, coughing or sneezing and diarrhea. Symptoms should immediately be reported to authorities.

The effort to protect domestic birds is particularly important to the state’s $1.5 billion turkey industry — Minnesota is the top turkey producer in the nation, raising 46.5 million birds annually.

Olson said the industry has in recent years moved to protect turkeys from coming into contact with wild birds. “When we used to raise turkeys outside, they came into contact with wild birds and got the flu. Now most are raised inside, and we’ve reduced that direct contact,” he said.

Turkey barns have mesh over windows and air vents to keep wild birds out.

The U.S. Agriculture Department has a plan to kill off any flock of turkeys or chickens where the deadly flu strain is suspected, even before tests are completed. Under the plan, if preliminary tests show the virus in a flock, it will be destroyed.

Owners of the birds will be paid market value for the birds — an effort at encouraging owners to report sick birds quickly.

Olson said the 400 member growers in his association understand the need for decisive action to contain any potential threat. He said his association is less concerned about individual flocks being killed than with the potential consumer reaction if the deadly bird flu arrives in the United States.

“The market is the biggest concern,” said Olson, noting the demand for turkey dropped considerably in other countries where the bird flu was detected.

“We are working on getting information out to people that this isn’t a food safety issue, and it isn’t even a human health issue unless it’s people who have significant direct contact with sick birds.”

Government officials say that even if sick birds got into the market, there would be no risk in eating them assuming normal food safety standards are followed — such as cooking the breast meat to at least 165 degrees.

Olson said a significant drop in turkey sales would ripple through the Minnesota economy, slowing sales of pork and beef, even harming grain farmers as demand for feed drops.

“If we don’t get the message out, from what we’ve seen happen in other countries, the impact could be immense,” Olson said.







Preparations for human flu pandemic lagging

The Associated Press



Preparations to combat a pandemic of bird flu that jumps to humans appears to be lagging.

Several U.S. senators are critical of the Department of Homeland Security, saying it is unprepared.

A new computer model shows if a pandemic influenza hits in the next year or so, the few weapons the United States has to keep it from spreading will do little.

The federal government can’t even tell people whether wearing a face mask would protect them if a flu pandemic hits.

A long-awaited study, ordered by the government, was inconclusive on how much help masks would be to ward off the virus.

“We don’t want to say, ‘Don’t use it,’ but don’t expect to be fully protected if you do use it. That’s a tough public health message to get out,” Dr. Donald Burke, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University, told the Associated Press.

The government has been trying to decide whether to stockpile things such as face masks in the event of a bird flu outbreak. The report gave them little help in making that decision. The health officials conducting the study said there isn’t clear evidence masks offer enough protection and they said people could get a false sense of security wearing masks, prompting them to go out in crowds when they shouldn’t.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are questioning the government’s preparedness effort. Several Democrat senators, including Minnesota’s Mark Dayton and Illinois’ Barack Obama, wrote a letter critical of the DHS.

They pointed to an Associated Press report last week that they said revealed dangerous lapses in front-line protections and containment. The report, from New York’s JFK Airport, revealed that customs officials discovered live birds in the luggage of a passenger from Vietnam. According to the DHS, the birds were not moved to a quarantine area upon their discovery, despite the fact Vietnam has the world’s highest fatality rate from avian flu.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, the journal Nature printed an article saying a computer model they ran showed a pandemic flu is likely to strike one in three people if nothing is done.

The report said that if the U.S. government acts fast enough and has enough anti-viral medicine for preventive dosings — which the United States does not — that could drop to about 28 percent of the population getting sick, the study found.

So far this year, H5N1 bird flu — which is not yet pandemic because it doesn’t move easily between humans — has infected 204 people and killed 113, according to the World Health Organization. Most of the human cases and deaths have been in Asia, but birds with the disease have been found in Europe.