By Joanne Dorr
The Haldimand Press
While farmers are adjusting to their new post-lockdown reality, many are also still contending with a lethal disease in the animal world: Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, also known as HPAI A(H5N1).
According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), HPAI can spread to birds through contact with infected poultry and poultry products. It can also spread through contaminated manure, litter, clothing, footwear, vehicles, equipment, feed, and water.
Once infected with HPAI, birds exhibit one or many symptoms. Examples of symptoms include a lack of energy, decreased egg production, coughing, tremors, and sudden death. With this, it is critical that farmers follow safety protocols to protect their flocks; these safety protocols are referred to as biosecurity measures.
Brian Ricker is a Haldimand turkey farmer and Chairman of the Turkey Farmers of Ontario. He explains that biosecurity is a safety plan geared toward preventative behaviours and best practices.
“Biosecutirty typically is not cost prohibitive,” says Ricker.
Among these affordable measures are keeping poultry away from areas frequented by wild birds, maintaining strict control over access to poultry houses, and not keeping bird feeders or duck ponds close to poultry barns as they would attract wild birds. Further to this, CFIA warns that chickens, pet birds, and other flocks could be at risk of catching the bird flu when they have access to the outdoors.
Infected wild birds, such as ducks and geese, can spread the disease by direct contact with outdoor flocks or by contaminating their environment. This includes ponds and other bodies of water. Echoing these facts, Haldimand egg farmer Nick Huitema says backyard flocks are the biggest threat to poultry and egg farmers.
Huitema adds, “If we had an outbreak, we’d have to depopulate the whole barn, clean it up, disinfect it. We would be at a loss of production for the time until we got enough birds to replace the flock.”
For Huitema, this means replacing 12,500 birds and incurring the expense of sanitizing the barn. Ensuring that farms are observing biosecurity protocols and reporting any observable HPAI related symptoms to authorities is key to safeguarding the egg and poultry food chain from interruptions and farmers from threats to their inventory and livelihood.
Several poultry, turkey, and egg farming organizations have changed the dates of their annual general meetings that were scheduled during the migratory season, allowing farmers to attend to their operations at a time when the threat of HPAI is high. This takes biosecurity to a brand new level.
Currently there are no tools that allow for quick, on-site testing for avian influenza; however, University of Guelph’s BioNano Laboratory is developing a rapid testing tool that may help to manage outbreaks in the future as another step to bettering the biosecurity measures available to farmers.
