Arkansas is prepared to fight an outbreak of bird flu, industry and government officials said Friday after the United States Department of Agriculture confirmed the first deadly case of the disease since June.
Bird flu hit a commercial turkey flock in Dubois County, Indiana, which is in the southern part of the state. The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said it was a strain of bird flu different from the one that caused the destruction of about 48 million birds last year.
Brandon Doss, Arkansas' state veterinarian, said he has been helping the state Livestock and Poultry Commission reach out to farmers who are growing poultry since the last outbreak.
"The poultry industry nationwide, and particularly in Arkansas, is doing everything they can to protect their flocks from this virus," he said.
Tyson Foods, the Arkansas-based poultry producer, said the company has no turkey operations in Indiana. It does have chicken operations in the southeast part of Indiana.
Tyson runs a chicken complex in Corydon, Indiana, about an hour drive from Dubois County, according to the company's website.
"We've been preparing for the possibility of the return of avian influenza since spring of last year," the company said in a statement. "Even though our chicken operations have not been affected and there has been no new case reported near our turkey operations since mid-June, all of our poultry operations are in a heightened biosecurity status."
All Tyson chicken operations in Indiana have been placed on an even higher biosecurity level, the company said. Some measures include limiting nonssential visitor access to contract farms and using biosecurity uniforms.
Tyson also tests all birds for the virus before they leave the farm, and the company knows the results before they are processed and sent to grocery stores and restaurants.
Bruce Holland, executive director of the Livestock and Poultry Commission, said there has been an effort to step up biosecurity measures since the weather cooled. The bird flu virus stays alive longer in cold weather.
"We've had a tremendous amount of meetings with the industry folks and growers," he said. "As soon as we had our outbreak last year, we started looking at what we were doing and how we were responding."
Marvin Childers, president of the Poultry Federation, a trade group for the industry in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, said the outbreak in Indiana could shut down trade between Arkansas poultry producers and foreign trading partners.
"Assuming that our trading partners do as they have done in other outbreaks, the shipment of poultry from the United States will be halted," he said. "It affects every state in the United States."
Bird flu last year dragged down exports for American producers as trading partners put up blanket bans on poultry from the U.S. The country's poultry and egg exports for the first half of 2015 fell 15 percent -- down $386.3 million to $2.4 billion form the same period last year -- according to a report by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Council.
"Some trade partners don't regionalize where the virus is," Holland said. "It's in America, and they shut the doors to all American poultry."
The federal Center for Disease Control considers the risk of bird flu to humans very low. Tyson said in a statement that there is no evidence to suggest that properly cooked poultry can transmit the disease to humans.
"Everyone will be waiting to see what happens in the next week or two," Holland said.
Business on 01/16/2016