Posted on 05/01/2015 2:39:07 PM PDT by iowamark
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad declared a state of emergency on Friday due to a rapidly expanding avian flu outbreak, soon after state agriculture officials announced four new poultry farms had initially tested positive for the virus.
Iowa, the top egg-producing state in the United States, is the third state to declare a state of emergency because of the viral outbreak, which either has led or will lead to the extermination of up to 21 million chickens and turkeys nationwide.
Minnesota and Wisconsin declared states of emergency in April...
Dozens of countries have imposed total or partial bans on U.S. poultry and poultry imports since the outbreak of avian influenza was discovered in December.
As of Friday afternoon, Iowa officials said, 21 farm sites in 10 Iowa counties had been identified as having either confirmed or presumed positive cases of the highly pathogenic H5 strain of bird flu.
The tally includes the nine Iowa farms that tested positive in the past 24 hours, including a commercial egg operation housing up to 5.5 million birds in Buena Vista County, and a separate egg-laying farm that houses 1 million birds in Madison County, according to Iowa's agriculture department.
So far, an estimated 16 million egg-laying chickens in Iowa are in infected or presumed infected farm facilities - meaning that at least one-quarter of the state's flock will have to be killed and disposed of, state officials said...
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Proclamation:
https://governor.iowa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/5.1.15%20Avian%20Flu%20Proclamation.pdf
video of press conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eArg3mJ3C58&feature=youtu.be
How did our all powerful, all knowing Federal Government miss this? I’m shocked.... It must be the Republicans!
This is getting pretty serious.
There is a lot of producers that have had to kill the entire flock. The more concerning thing for me is that most of these farms have decent quarantine controls. That doesn’t seem to matter.
That and there are large hog confinements near some of these affected farms.
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