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Fall migration renews avian flu concerns, Iowa Ag Secretary urges vigilance

The transition from summer to fall is renewing calls for highly pathogenic avian influenza prevention and detection.

Iowa Ag Secretary Mike Naig says recent cases in Nebraska and Minnesota serve as reminders migration is beginning.

“We still have a challenge obviously with those wild bird introductions. So as those birds are migrating in the spring and the fall, we certainly are on high alert. I know our producers are.”

He tells Brownfield the poultry industry has made tremendous strides since the 2015 avian flu outbreak.

“The first time we really had a sizeable outbreak in the United States in a long, long time, there was a lot of lateral movement. Meaning the disease was spreading from farm to farm. As we came into the most recent several years of outbreak, these were independent wild bird introductions.”

Naig says the lack of farm-to-farm movement is a testament to significant investments made to prevent high-path avian flu from breaching commercial poultry facilities.