Bird Flu Outbreak Confirmed in Indiana

Bird Flu

The Department of Agriculture confirmed on Friday that a strain of avian influenza had hit a commercial flock of turkeys in Indiana.

“It is a significant virus that does need an immediate response in order to contain it and prevent its spread to other facilities,” said Dr. T. J. Myers, associate deputy administrator in the U.S.D.A.’s animal and plant health inspection service, during a conference call.

Avian influenza dominated agricultural news last spring, decimating flocks throughout the Midwest and in isolated cases along the West Coast. Roughly 50 million birds were destroyed in an effort to contain the virulent disease, costing the industry more than $3 billion.

The last case was reported in June, and poultry companies had begun to breathe more easily after making it through the holidays without an outbreak. In September, the Agriculture Department issued a plan to prepare and to deal with future cases based on lessons learned from the outbreak.

The strain of avian influenza identified in the new outbreak, in Dubois County, Ind., was identified as H7N8, different from the strain that wreaked most of the havoc last year. According to a U.S.D.A. agricultural census from 2012, Dubois County was home to some 1.4 million turkeys and was the leading county in Indiana for poultry production.

Officials said they did not know of any case in the latest outbreak in which the flu had been passed to humans.

Federal and state officials have not been able to pinpoint the exact cause of last year’s outbreaks. Dr. Myers said trucking and other traffic between facilities may have helped the virus jump from farm to farm, and that wild birds had likely played a role in introducing the flu to commercial flocks. He also said the U.S.D.A. believed that the virus could travel on its own in the air “very, very short distances.”

In July, the federal agency began a yearlong program of testing wild birds, Dr. Myers said, and had found some of the roughly 25,000 examined so far were carrying H7N8 strains of the virus. All of those, however, were considered to be carrying “low pathogenic” strains, meaning the risk of widespread infection was not high. The vaccines that the agency had purchases for avian influenza are for H5 strains, because it was not anticipating H7 cases, he added.

In addition, Dr. Myers said the agency was contacting nations that are trading partners in the hopes of avoiding a blanket ban on imports.

France has been struggling to contain its first avian influenza outbreak since 2007, and various countries in Africa have reported outbreaks, particularly Nigeria. Various strains have also shown up in Taiwan and mainland China.