It has been 5 months since the H5N2 bird flu emerged in the U.S and till now has caused a death toll of 21 million poultries just in the Midwest. Researchers have said that as of now, they don’t have adequate knowledge of the virus that has put the population of turkey and egg-laying chickens at risk.
The extensive range of H5N2 virus has left agencies such as US Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bewildered in the middle of this severe bio-security measures and evident lack of unrestrained death in unprotected backyard flocks.
Dr. Alicia Fry, CDC’s leader of the influenza prevention and control team said, ‘‘At this point, we don’t know very much about these viruses because they’ve only recently been identified, ‘‘We’re following the situation very closely because this is something we’re continuing to understand.”
In winter of 2014, the current H5N2 virus made appearance in Canada and had been identified in the US in early December from a wild bird on the West Coast. The producers had no choice but to eradicate millions of turkeys and chickens after poultry operations found bird flu to be positive in 8 of the Midwest states.
It had been speculated by scientists that rats or small birds had been responsible for bringing the virus in while searching for scrap food in the vicinity of the barns.
Flies had been considered to be couriers too since back in both the 1983 Pennsylvania outbreak and in the Japan outbreak in 2004, the influenza virus had been detected on insects. The chief veterinarian of the USDA even considered the idea that the wind could have blown dust and feathers through air vents and that is how the virus came in.
As operations had been infected on a daily basis, the USDA epidemiologists were trying to determine if the virus came from the wild or may have spread to the poultry in a barn or a farm close by.
It has left the scientists puzzled that the infections are swelling up. The USDA has identified 12 cases, with 5 of them in Washington in January and February and in Wisconsin, Kansas, Idaho, Oregon, Minnesota and Montana.
It is still a matter of obscurity whether the virus will die off with the increase in temperatures and the surge of UV light. The director of the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga., David Swayne considers it hard to foresee what the future has in store.
