Ontario’s feather sector is moving to a “heightened biosecurity advisory” after highly pathogenic avian influenza was confirmed this weekend in a poultry flock.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday it had confirmed high-path H5N1 in a flock in southern Ontario, a day after the Ontario Feather Board Command Centre (FBCC) published a report of two “suspect positive” cases.
CFIA didn’t give a more specific location for the confirmed property Sunday. A more detailed report from the agency on the case also hasn’t yet been published online by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) as of early Monday morning.
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The FBCC said Saturday one of the two suspect cases it’s following is a poultry operation showing “increased mortality and clinical signs” of bird flu in the Wellington County/Waterloo area of southwestern Ontario, north of Kitchener.
The other, FBCC said, is a turkey operation in the Thamesford area, east of London, showing “increased mortality” among birds.
CFIA said it has placed the affected premises under quarantine and is setting up “movement control measures” for the property. The agency said it’s also recommending “enhanced biosecurity for other farms within that area.”
The new Ontario case follows a confirmed case of the virus in a wild red-tailed hawk in that province, which was reported Thursday to the OIE.
The virus found in the hawk contained “a unique constellation of gene segments,” CFIA said, some of which are of a lineage specific to North American wild birds — while other segments relate to the strain found in birds in recent months in Atlantic Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
High-path H5N1 cases in Canada since last fall have included wild birds in all four Atlantic provinces and a bald eagle in the Vancouver area, plus domestic birds at two “non-poultry” farms in Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula and two non-commercial backyard flocks in Nova Scotia.
Canada had been deemed free of high-path avian flu, however, from 2015 up until last month when H5N1 was confirmed at a commercial poultry farm and at a mixed farm with poultry, both in Nova Scotia.
After the disease was confirmed in Canadian commercial birds in February, several countries including the U.S., European Union, Japan and Korea put import restrictions in place on Canadian poultry, eggs and/or other products, or on those from Nova Scotia.
In the U.S. since February, cases of H5N1 have been confirmed in commercial poultry and/or backyard flocks in 17 states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Virgina and Wisconsin. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
