Another Northwest Iowa turkey flock hit by bird flu

A commercial flock of about 90,000 turkeys in Ida County is the seventh to be infected by highly pathogenic avian influenza this month in Northwest Iowa, according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.

The state’s detection rate of the virus at commercial facilities has dramatically increased in December, with six of those seven confirmations in the past week. Those virus confirmations led to the culling of about 385,000 turkeys.

Entire flocks are destroyed to prevent the spread of the virus from facility to facility.

The mostly likely source of transmission has been wild, migrating birds, which can be infected and asymptomatic. The virus is often deadly for domestic birds. But it poses a low health risk to humans.

There have now been a total of 30 known infected commercial and backyard flocks in Iowa this year, with a total of nearly 16 million birds. That is by far the biggest bird death toll of any state this year, even though other states have had a much higher number of affected flocks. That’s because several of the Iowa flocks were massive groups of egg-laying chickens — two of which had at least 5 million birds apiece.

In Minnesota, there have been at least 109 infected flocks with a total of about 4.2 million birds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s nearly four times the number of infected Iowa flocks but about one-quarter of the affected birds. Most of the affected commercial Minnesota facilities had turkeys, the largest of which was a flock of about 298,000.

There was about a five-month lull in detections in Iowa this summer between the northern and southern migrations of wild birds.

This article first appeared in the Iowa Capital Dispatch.