An outbreak of bird flu has hit Missouri, but as Harvest Public Media’s Peggy Lowe reports, this doesn’t mean a repeat of last year’s massive outbreak.
The bad news: A commercial turkey flock in Jaspar County, near Joplin, was found to be infected with H5N1 avian flu. That’s confirmed by the Missouri Department of Agriculture. Thirty-nine thousand birds were destroyed last week as a precaution and the farm is still quarantined.
The good news: This strain is what’s called “low pathogenic.” That means it’s not as contagious as the highly pathogenic bird flu that devastated chicken and turkey farms in the Midwest last spring. That one was H5N2.
Just this week, a quarantine on the last of ten Indiana poultry farms was lifted. That’s where a bird flu outbreak was discovered in January. It, too, was not considered as dangerous as last spring’s outbreak.
