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Nearly 3.5 million chickens in Lancaster County have been destroyed because of avian flu.
Despite that, state Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding said he’s encouraged about where Pennsylvania stands in the fight against the devastating virus.
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Redding said he feels confident in the actions being taken to stop the spread of avian flu.
“We have to contain this virus. That’s what this game is about right now,” he said.
The state’s effort to do that is working so far.
Three commercial chicken farms have tested positive for avian flu, and they are all in what’s being called the control zone. It’s the six-mile radius surrounding the East Donegal Township farm where the virus was first detected.
According to Redding, the control zone is critical to stopping the spread of avian flu.
“To control what goes in, what comes out and to make sure that both the affected farms but also those who could infect other farms – not just in the zone but outside – were permitted to do so and contained,” he said.
Redding said the limitations being imposed on all of the farms in control zone are working.
“We put more restrictions in than anybody would prefer from a business standpoint, but really critical to reassure the markets and also our international trading partners that we’ve got command of this,” he said.
Redding said a lot has been learned since the last outbreak of avian flu in the 1980s, and those lessons are helping the state make sure it has a strong response now.
A satellite has been used to identify a California farm as the source of methane plumes, marking a new level of precision for independent monitoring of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions
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Methane emissions from cows detected by satelliteGHGSat
Cows’ contribution to climate change through belching and flatulence is about to face a whole new level of scrutiny. Scientists have previously monitored the methane emissions of cattle from the ground and planes and now they have seen cow-related methane plumes from space for the first time.
Canadian aerospace firm GHGSat used one of its three satellites to pinpoint the source of five methane plumes as a single cattle farm in the San Joaquin Valley nearly 10 kilometres south-east of Bakersfield in California. The …
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“We want to reassure Coloradans that the risk to them is low,” said Dr. Rachel Herlihy, state epidemiologist, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
According to a CDC news release, the patient was involved in killing flocks presumed to be infected with H5N1. Because of that, though the CDC said they can’t verify the person didn’t test positive because of some sort of surface contamination, the case was being treated as an actual infection.
Both agencies said the infected person’s only reported symptom was fatigue, which they experienced for a few days before they recovered. The CDC said noting the person was in isolation and receiving oseltamivir as a treatment. The antiviral is also used to treat swine flu, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The CDC reports that it has more than 2,500 people with exposures to H5N1 virus-infected birds to date, but have only confirmed the one case so far.
“Other people involved in the culling operation in Colorado have tested negative for H5 virus infection, but they are being retested out of an abundance of caution,” the release states.
H5N1 viruses have been found among commercial and backyard bird flocks in 29 U.S. states as well as wild birds in 34 states, according to the CDC.
“Infected birds shed H5N1 viruses in their saliva, mucous, and feces,” the release states.
The first H5N1 case was confirmed in December 2021 in the U.K., the CDC reports. That person, who raised birds that became infected with the virus, reported no symptoms.
Also on Thursday, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture and the USDA announced an eighth site of bird flu contamination had been found. The small backyard mixed flock, located in Washington County, was currently under quarantine and was scheduled for disposal after a case was confirmed there.
NDA also reported that they were monitoring a positive HPAI case identified in a backyard flock in Republic County, Kan., as the exposure area extends into Nuckolls County in south-central Nebraska.
Once again, we paid our federal income taxes. We do this as “the price of civilization” — to pay for the services we value and rely upon — disaster relief, help during the pandemic, wildfire protection, food security, a host of others and … nuclear weapons?
etcetera. So it it’s number one. It’s an excuse for their failure.
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Biden: Idea of larger proxy war ‘not true’Unmute
What part of civilization do they represent? Just who exactly is helped by nuclear weapons? The situation in Ukraine shows that the old excuse — they deter the aggressive inclinations of other nations — is not valid. It also shows that — far from providing security — their presence in the hands of the Russians is preventing the NATO nations from protecting Ukrainians from…
Conservationists are once again calling for an end to B.C.’s controversial annual wolf cull, saying it is cruel and unnecessary.
Every year the B.C. government hires contractors to kill hundreds of wolves to help save the dwindling caribou herds. Most of the wolves are shot from helicopters.
The program started in 2015. The Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship told Global News Thursday that 280 wolves were killed this past winter and more than 1,700 have been killed since the program started.
Advocate and activist Sadie Parr said she became aware of the wolf cull in B.C. around 2007, which she said was being done “under the guise of caribou recovery.
“But the fact of the matter is, we’re still destroying caribou habitat to this day.”
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Parr said it was in 2015 that the aerial gunning of wolves began in the province after the B.C. Wolf Management Plan was released a year earlier.
“So it’s been seven or eight consecutive years of winter aerial gunning programs that have expanded over that time.”
Parr has spent years investigating the program and among the many things about it that disturb her is the so-called Judas Wolf technique. This involves capturing a wolf in a net and putting a radio collar on it to lead government-contracted shooters back to its pack so they can be killed.
“Most often wolves are captured, one wolf will be captured, it might be ground-trapping or it might be net-trapped from a helicopter and this wolf is immobilized and a radio collar is placed around it,” Parr said.
“The wolf is not killed at the time, it’s kept alive and it’s later in the winter months when the wolf returns to the rest of its family that contracted shooters hired from the government will come in using aircraft to follow the signal on the collar.
“They’re hoping that the wolf at that point is with the rest of its family. If it has joined up with the rest of its family the contractors will shoot down every single wolf in that area other than the one wolf that’s radio-collared. That’s usually identified with an ear tag so they can keep that wolf alive.”
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Parr said this would no doubt be very distressing for the wolves. They are running for their lives; they could be hit with multiple bullets and wounded and take hours to die in agony.
“And then that one wolf, it’s often called the ‘Judas Wolf’, would be left alive for the next year,” she said.
“Wolves are social animals. It’s going to try and regroup and start a new family only to have the very same thing happen to any wolf it befriends the next year.”
1:19B.C. wolf cull look backB.C. wolf cull look back – Jan 20, 2016
In a statement to Global News the Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship said this method “provides data to government biologists about wolf movements and pack territories and helps facilitate the removal of packs during winter wolf reduction efforts. The removal of packs within treatment areas is critical to supporting caribou survival.”
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Adam Olsen, the MLA for Saanich North and the Islands and a member of the BC Green Party called the wolf cull program a “colossal and cruel policy failure.
“The reality of it is we’re not managing the landscape at all in this province,” Olsen said. “Our logging practices are incredibly destructive, that we’re still clear-cutting entire mountainsides. This is threatening caribou and many other species.”
Olsen added the government is reluctant to bring about biodiversity legislation and poor landscape management in the province has led to the culling of wolves, which he said is a “terrible thing to think about.
“The ultimate enemy of the caribou is human beings. We are unapologetically destroying their habitat. We apologize to the wolves for having to kill them because we’ve exposed the caribou and made them too easy to hunt for wolf packs but we are absolutely the greatest threat to the caribou and to several other species.”
The Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship said “predator reduction aids caribou recovery and is based on science and sound wildlife management principles.
“The decision to reduce predator populations is not taken lightly. It requires an adaptive management approach, with high standards for scientific rigour and the use of humane methods.”
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The group Pacific Wild has also sued the province, arguing the program is unlawful.
A ruling is expected in early June.
“I really don’t believe that killing has anything to do with conservation,” Parr said.
“This really puts a stain on B.C. and on Canada, this program should never have begun in the first place….It’s shameful, it’s horrifying, it’s embarrassing, and it really needs to end.”
Although wild birds are much more likely to survive bird flu than domestic fowl, Montana wildlife officials are still noticing fatalities.
In a press conference Friday, employees of state Fish, Wildlife and Parks said that while waterfowl seem likely to survive Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, wild turkeys are dying. The discovery comes as the state’s male wild turkey season begins. Hunters are advised to avoid birds that appear sick.
“It appears these birds, at least the ones in Montana, these animals, several of them died in one location. So, it might be highly fatal to them,” said Jennifer Ramsey, FWP veterinarian.
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Conservative firebrand Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, put Muskin a pantheonalongside only former PresidentDonald Trumpand Florida Gov. Ron…
The first known human case of H5N1 bird flu in the United States has been detected in a person in Colorado, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The person tested positive after being involved in the culling of poultry presumed to have had H5N1 bird flu, the CDC said in a statement. The infection comes amid a wider outbreak of the particular strain of bird flu in the US.
The agency said that the case was only the second human infection globally with the specific group of H5 viruses, with the first detected in the United Kingdom.
“This case does not change the human risk assessment for the general public, which CDC considers to be low,” the agency said.
The agency began monitoring people believed to be exposed to the virus in 2021. It has been detected in commercial and back-yard birds in 29 states in the US and in wild birds in 34 states.
The outbreak has resulted in the culling of millions of chickens and turkeys across the US.
Health experts have voiced concern that the continued spread of the virus could lead to mutations that more easily spread to humans.
A previous outbreak of the H5 virus in the US occurred in 2015, but no cases were detected in humans, according to the CDC. Several countries detected outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry last year.
The infected patient reported fatigue for a few days as the only symptom and has since recovered, the CDC said, adding that the person was being isolated and treated with the influenza antiviral drug oseltamivir.
“CDC has tracked the health of more than 2,500 people with exposures to H5N1 virus-infected birds and this is the only case that has been found to date. Other people involved in the culling operation in Colorado have tested negative for H5 virus infection, but they are being retested out of an abundance of caution,” the CDC said.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
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China reports first human case of H10N3 bird fluA man, aged 41, in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu was hospitalised on April 28 and diagnosed with H10N3 on May 28.Published On 2 Jun 20212 Jun 2021
India probes its first human death from bird fluEleven-year-old boy’s death highlights new risk for world’s second-most populous nation battling the COVID pandemic.Published On 22 Jul 202122 Jul 2021
The presumed burial pit of chickens on Rembrandt Foods property. Photograph: Dan Brouillette/The Guardian
Laborers worked for a month disposing of birds killed in a gruesomely inhumane manner. Then they found they too were disposable
Chris McGreal in Rembrandt, IowaThu 28 Apr 2022 05.00 EDT
Labourers at the one of the world’s largest egg factories arrived at the plant in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to discover they were about to work themselves out of a job.
As they gathered at the huge barns housing stacks of caged hens, the workers were told to forget about their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of avian influenza. Even supervisors were assigned to the arduous task of dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises raced to contain the spread of the virus, amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the US in seven years.
The culling has been repeated at chicken and turkey farms across Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah. More than 22m birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the US’s biggest producer of eggs. The slaughter of 5.3m hens at Rembrandt is the largest culling at any factory farm in the country.
Workers spent nearly a month pulling the dead poultry from the cages and dumping them in carts before they were piled high in nearby fields and buried in huge pits. The killing over, about 250 people were summarily thrown out of work with just a few dozen skeleton staff remaining.
In the weeks that followed, animal rights protesters targeted Rembrandt’s billionaire owner, Glen Taylor, over the cull, including disrupting games played by the professional basketball team he owns, the Minnesota Timberwolves. But few voices have been raised in support of Rembrandt’s workers, some of them undocumented migrants.
Others fired from the plant contrast the seriousness with which the bird flu outbreak has been taken by Rembrandt’s management to what they describe as the company’s lax approach to the threat to workers from Covid, as it swept through factory farms and slaughterhouses in Iowa and elsewhere.
“Right now everybody’s worried about the chickens,” said Oscar Garcia, a former supervisor at the plant. “We get it: it was really inhumane the way they killed them. But chickens are chickens, right? People worked in those barns pulling out dead birds in terrible conditions, faeces everywhere, doing 12- or 14-hour days.
“They couldn’t protest because then they’d be fired and lose their redundancy pay. Then they’re thrown out of work and no one speaks for them.”
Outside criticism of Rembrandt has focused on the method of killing. Chicken farms have previously slaughtered hens en masse by suffocating them with foam or pumping barns full of carbon dioxide, methods that have been criticized as inhumane.
Oscar Garcia, a former plant supervisor at Rembrandt Foods. Photograph: Dan Brouillette/The Guardian
But Tom Cullen of the Iowa newspaper the Storm Lake Times revealed that birds at Rembrandt were culled using a system known as ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) in which air is closed off to the barns and heat pumped in until the temperature rises above 104F (40C).
“They cooked those birds alive,” said one of the Rembrandt workers involved in the culling.
An animal rights group, Animal Outlook, used freedom of information laws to obtain records of experiments at North Carolina State University that show that VSD+ causes “extreme suffering” to the hens as they “writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape”.
“Eventually the birds collapse and, finally, die from heat and suffocation,” the group said.
Members of another group, Direct Action Everywhere, have disrupted Timberwolves games in recent weeks wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Glen Taylor Roasts Animals Alive”.
James Roth, director of the Center for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa state university’s college of veterinary medicine and an adviser to the federal government on biosecurity, acknowledged that VSD+ causes more suffering than other forms of culling, but said it is the most efficient means of containing the spread of bird flu because it is relatively swift.
“Nobody wants to see it used, but sometimes it is, as a last resort. The rationale is if the influenza virus spreads so fast that it’ll go through a poultry house really rapidly, all of those birds produce massive amounts of virus in the air. Then you have a big plume of virus coming from that house that spreads to other poultry houses. It’s critical to get the birds euthanised before that virus becomes a huge plume of virus to spread,” he said.
USDA workers in the area where millions of chickens were dumped in a pit, on Rembrandt Foods property. Photograph: Dan Brouillette/The GuardianThe Rembrandt Foods plant. Photograph: Dan Brouillette/The Guardian
Roth said that the authorities appear to have learned important lessons from 2015, when a bird flu outbreak resulted in what the US agriculture department calls “the largest poultry health disaster in US history”, with the slaughter of about 50 million chickens and turkeys.
This time federal regulators moved quickly to contain the outbreak by shutting down the movement of workers between poultry flocks, a significant cause of the spread of avian flu in 2015. But Roth said this year the virus appears to have arrived in the US carried by waterfowl from Europe and to be better adapted to be spread by wild birds, which are harder to contain.
That prompted the USDA to press for a swift culling at infected poultry farms. On 17 March, Rembrandt notified its supervisors that avian flu had been detected on the site.
“They sent out email at 10.30pm letting us know they had a confirmed case,” said a former Rembrandt worker who was obliged to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to receive redundancy payments.
When the worker arrived the next day he discovered the company had already begun slaughtering millions of chickens.
“Once they’re dead, we had to take them out by hand one by one, put them in a wheelbarrow. That’s really intense manual labour. They are not very big cages. Twelve chickens are crammed in there. Awful conditions,” he said.
Once the birds had been killed and buried, the company fired most of the workers. Photograph: Dan Brouillette/The Guardian
“After it was over, we were told to attend a meeting. We walked in. There was a big stack of yellow envelopes. That’s like showing a knife to a chicken. You know what’s going to happen next. We worked ourselves out of a job. I saw people who had years and years of experience just being let go. It was totally unexpected.”
Some workers thought the layoff might be temporary, as it was during the 2015 outbreak. But they were given redundancy payments and told to find other jobs, suggesting the move was permanent and raising questions about the future of the plant.
Some of the skilled former workers have had little trouble finding another job. Others have struggled. “I’m just rushing to find a job in order to support my family,” said a former Rembrandt employee with several years at the company.
Those struggling include undocumented workers who, Garcia said, were hired indirectly through third-party contractors.
In February, the Storm Lake Times reported that a lawsuit by the family of a Guatemalan migrant worker who was crushed to death when cages collapsed on him revealed that he had been working under a false name through a subcontractor.
Garcia also contrasted the seriousness with which Rembrandt took bird flu to the company’s handling of Covid-19 as it surged in Iowa, particularly among labourers working close together on factory farms and in slaughterhouses. He said Rembrandt appeared to care more about avian flu outbreaks than Covid. He criticised the management for failing to require workers to wear a mask or to be vaccinated.
“They actually liked the fact that we didn’t require our employees to get vaccinated, because they were hoping we would get employees from the surrounding areas that were requiring their employees to get vaccinated. They’re using it almost as a recruitment tool,” he said.
Other workers said that when they contracted Covid, they were obliged to use the days off they had earned as holidays instead of being given sick days.
“It’s a company that makes millions of dollars. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it doesn’t care about people,” said Garcia.
Rembrandt Enterprises has been approached for comment.
U.S. Senate bill would allow tribes to renegotiate the right to manage hunting and fishing on tribal lands
The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are working to lift state restrictions on tribal fishing and hunting imposed by a controversial agreement nearly 40 years ago.
Federal legislation backed by several members of Oregon’s congressional delegationwould overturn a consent decreethat tribal members say was forced upon them in the 1980s.
Members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde hold a first foods ceremony with a traditionally harvested salmon.Courtesy of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
Grand Ronde tribal member and ceremonial fisher Sara Thompsontold OPB’s Think Out Loudthis week that federal termination took the tribes’ reservation land away, and to get any of it back, the state gave the tribes an ultimatum.
1:19B.C. wolf cull look backB.C. wolf cull look back – Jan 20, 2016
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