Bird flu dooms a quarter of Iowa’s laying hens

Iowa's bird flu epidemic widened Thursday with the announcement of five new probable cases - one of them threatening doom for 5.5 million laying hens in hard-hit Buena Vista County.

'A week ago we had the disease at three sites. It went from 12 to 17 today,” Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey said during an increasingly frequent telephone news conference on the subject.

Northey announced that the Iowa Concern Hotline (800-447-1985) has been activated to answer questions and provide information about the disease.

State officials continue to discuss but have taken no action on a state emergency declaration that could authorize Iowa National Guard assistance, he said.

In Minnesota, which has declared an emergency, National Guard troops were deployed to haul water needed for foam-based techniques to euthanize birds.

Meanwhile, supervisors in Wright County, 80 miles east of the nearest confirmed case in northwest Iowa, declared an emergency there in an effort to protect the county's 15 million chickens.

The declaration authorizes the supervisors to set up an incident command and reroute trucks carrying poultry from outside the county away from local chicken barns.

Also Thursday, Iowa's congressional delegation urged U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to provide additional assistance to Iowa and more than a dozen other states affected by the disease.

Thursday's new cases include three in Buena Vista County and one each in Sioux and Clay counties.

In addition to the 5.5 million-hen commercial laying operation, the Buena Vista cases include two turkey facilities still awaiting bird population estimates.

Sioux County's third case involves 84,000 hens, and Clay County's first case involves a yet to be determined number of laying hens.

Northey noted that more than 15 million Iowa hens - about 25 percent of the leading egg-producing state's hen population - are likely to be euthanized.

'Once you start getting those kinds of numbers, you can start seeing an upward push on prices,” he said.

Randy Olson, director of the Iowa Poultry Association, and Gretta Irwin, director of the Iowa Turkey Federation, said most of their phone calls have been coming from producers rather than concerned consumers.

'The good news we can tell them is that eggs are safe to eat,” Olson said.

While lethal to domestic poultry, the H5N2 virus is not known to have caused disease in humans and is not expected to pose a risk to public health or the food supply.

Northey said the USDA pays affected producers most of the cost of lost birds and euthanization and disinfection of their facilities, 'but not for any lost income going forward.”

'Our hearts go out to the folks that are going through this,” he said.

USDA officials said Thursday it is 'highly probable” that bird flu will return next fall when wild bird populations migrate south, potentially spreading the viruses into new regions of the country.