Editorial: Bird flu is endemic

Bird flu is back, if it ever left. It was unfamiliar to most of us back in 2015, when it wiped out five million chickens at Rembrandt and hundreds of thousands of turkeys. Two commercial poultry operations were hit over the past week, an egg-layer in Sioux County and a turkey operation in Palo Alto County. That suggests that the flu is here, with that huge flock of geese honking out on Storm Lake.

It has become endemic and a direct threat to human heath and safety. The flu has been found dairies across the country. Dairy workers were infected with slight symptoms. Within months of being reported, children with no apparent connections to livestock or fowl are desperately ill. We know of 58 human cases. Many others are not reported by immigrants working in the livestock industry afraid of being fired or deported.

Researchers and advocacy groups are looking at concentration of animals giving rise to the spread and mutation of pandemic diseases. “When we introduce the virus to poultry operations where birds live in unsanitary and highly confined conditions, the virus is … able to spread through them like wildfire,” Ben Rankin, a legal expert with the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group, told Inside Climate News. “There are so many more opportunities for the virus to mutate, to adapt to new kinds of hosts and eventually, the virus spills back into the wild and this creates this cycle, or this loop, of intensification and increasing pathogenicity.”

Changing weather patterns, which shift waterfowl breeding schedules and flyways, conspire with concentration to foster the spread of the flu. It has reached swine in Oregon, which promotes a pathway for mutated forms to jump to humans. It could take just one mutation for the dominant virus to spread from human-to-human, according to research published last week.

Our approach is as if we were still dealing with diverse family farms. We have just now begun routine testing of bulk milk after USDA dragged its feet for months if not years. Questions arose in our mind a decade ago when outdoor chickens did not appear to take on the flu while confined hens did. Outdoor chickens presumably would have more exposure than a confined bird. The virus is insidious, and once inside destroys entire flocks.

We have over the past half-century built a protein system around consolidation and concentration that avoids regulation. For example, the broiler industry resists vaccination because it could affect export sales of finished meat. Inspection has been left up to the producer or processor for meat and milk. Our production system is predicated on safety but is built around keeping millions of birds wing-to-wing, or packing thousands porkers in tight, and then spreading their infected waste on land all around us. Consumers have a sense that it is not sustainable, and put pressure to allow animals more space. The USDA sued to overturn California rules limiting confinement. The government does not believe that concentration is an issue for the food system in any sense. Democratic and Republican administrations have moved toward allowing the industry to regulate itself as it morphs into a handful of conglomerates more powerful than the regulator.

We are hurtling forward faster than our systems can adapt. Our economy suffers greatly when turkey production is halted. Heaven forbid that bird flu become a virulent swine flu. Conditions are ripe.

We need more funding for livestock research. Too bad the farm bill is frozen by House conservatives like Rep. Randy Feenstra, whose business should be the safety of the pork, dairy and poultry operations in Northwest Iowa. We need vaccination of dairy herds. We cannot take on more and larger hog confinements — Iowa land cannot handle more, and neither can our rivers. We need to provide more education, testing and protective gear to ag and food workers. We need stronger inspection protocols maintained by the USDA and not by the consolidated meat and dairy companies whose primary motivation is profit.

The Covid pandemic should be fresh enough to remind what happens if disease shuts down food processing. We are just climbing out of that inflationary spiral. The reason that egg prices remain relatively high is because of disease shutdowns, not government spending. This has been going on for at least a decade, and it is only spreading while hampering supply. The avian flu is more likely than not to mutate into a more virulent form that could wreak havoc on food production. 2015 was an introduction to a problem that we did not previously have. Our systems need to adapt if we are to be protected. We’re still partly in denial over the impacts, and over the fact that Old McDonald got driven off the farm a long time ago, about the time that we put hogs indoors.