It looks like we are not the only ones burdened by a virus. South Carolina poultry are being killed by the thousands in hopes of stopping an infectious bird flu from spreading and potentially jumping species.
“The high pathogenic case was found at an operation in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, marking the first case of the more dangerous strain since one found in a Tennessee chicken flock in 2017. In 2015, an estimated 50 million poultry had to be killed at operations mainly in the Upper Midwest after infections spread throughout the region.
“Yes, it’s concerning when we see cases, but we are prepared to respond very quickly and that was done in this case,” said Lyndsay Cole, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
The USDA has been working in recent months with scientists and farmers in North Carolina and South Carolina, where a low pathogenic — or less severe — strain of bird flu had been detected.
Low pathogenic bird flu causes few clinical signs in infected birds. However, two strains of low pathogenic bird flu — the H5 and H7 strains — can mutate into highly pathogenic forms, which are frequently fatal to birds and easily transmissible between susceptible species.
Low pathogenic cases were already in an area near the South Carolina and North Carolina state line and USDA was closely monitoring and testing. The case in Chesterfield County, South Carolina was expected to be another low pathogenic case, but it came back from the laboratory high pathogenic which means the less severe virus mutated into the more severe version, Cole said.”
“A laboratory in Ames, Iowa, confirmed the virus with that had been killing turkeys was a high pathogenic H7N3 strain of avian influenza.
A report on the outbreak indicates in was discovered on April 6. It has killed 1,583 turkeys and the remainder of the 32,577 birds in the flock were euthanized.”
Hopefully, they stop this virus in its tracks as we need to stop it from crossing over to our species if it does it would dwarf the Corona Virus’s mortality rate. Hence why they are killing off birds by the thousands to save us from a pandemic predicted to be worse than the 1918 Influenza pandemic that killed off 50 million.
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