Avian Virus Surfaces in Egg Industry
An outbreak of a rare poultry disease -- harmless to humans but fatal to birds -- has shown up in the state’s commercial egg industry, forcing state officials to destroy more than 100,000 hens at a Riverside County ranch and heightening fears that it could spread to major livestock operations in Central California.
A team of state and local officials began destroying the hens last weekend after tests revealed that some were infected with exotic Newcastle disease, a highly contagious viral disorder that can kill birds without warning, U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman Larry Hawkins said Friday.
The 100,000 birds destroyed in Riverside County constitute a small fraction of the 280 million chickens and turkeys on commercial farms in California. But the fact that the virus has crossed over into commercial poultry production has the $3-billion industry scrambling to adopt stricter safety standards.
“We can’t afford to let it move north of the Tehachapis, into the largest poultry-growing area of the state,” said Bill Mattos, president of the California Poultry Federation, which represents 160 producers.
He said Central Valley ranchers, who raise nearly all of the state’s meat birds and 40% of its eggs, are “concerned, with capital letters. If it gets into a commercial area in Fresno, that could be devastating.”
The spreading disease -- first spotted Sept. 27 in a flock of backyard chickens in Compton -- also has cast a pall over U.S. trade relations. Only 2% of the industry’s revenue comes from overseas sales. But Mexico, which buys 40% of the exports, already has barred California poultry and eggs because of the outbreak, Mattos said, as have some Far East countries such as Taiwan.
“The big economic risk is of domestic trading partners and foreign trading partners imposing sanctions against California, or against the entire United States, as a result of having the disease here,” said Hawkins, the USDA spokesman.
Exotic Newcastle, for which there is no vaccine, affects all kinds of fowl, including ducks, geese and pigeons. It causes flu-like symptoms in birds, including sneezing, coughing and diarrhea. The last time the virus hit the state’s poultry industry was in the early 1970s, when 12 million chickens had to be destroyed at a cost of more than $50 million.
The disease took almost three years to eradicate.
At Foster Farms in Livingston, there’s been no incident of Newcastle because of the strict safety measures Foster uses to raise table-bound chickens, said Randy Boyce, a company vice president. Todd Beal, director of quality assurance for Zacky Farms of South El Monte, which now raises turkeys exclusively, said the company is “worried, but we maintain a very strict bio-security program.”
After the outbreak began showing up in backyard birds in Southern California, state and federal officials imposed quarantines on all of Los Angeles County and parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Inspectors searched nearly 4,200 backyards and have destroyed 40,000 birds at 1,043 homes, government records show.
The quarantine also covered about 100 commercial ranches, part of a Southern California poultry sector that produces 60% of the state’s eggs from an estimated 9 million hens.
The situation escalated when the owner of an egg ranch in western Riverside County contacted authorities about an “unusual mortality in his flock.” Tests last weekend confirmed exotic Newcastle.
The crossover of the disease into the commercial sector prompted conference calls between poultry producers and state and federal agriculture officials this week, according to Mattos.
He said the industry is urging all producers to enact stricter health protocols for the chicken ranches. Those include forbidding visitors to poultry farms and requiring all personnel to have their clothes disinfected.
The goal: Keep exotic Newcastle bottled up in Southern California, then eradicate it.
“The industry’s very concerned about what’s happening, and that’s why the bio-security is going to be stepped up even more, even if we can have the government get involved in a legal sort of way,” Mattos said. “This is very serious.”
