Brief Follow-up from Last Evening-Ohio

Final January Poultry H5N1 Confirmed Case Counts Posted Saturday Morning by ODA

My column yesterday was devoted to a large escalating H5N1 2.3.4.4b (clade not specified) outbreak in Ohio poultry flocks in the last month: Ohio H5N1 Poultry Disaster Continues

In retrospect I should have waited until now to post the column because the reliable Ohio Department of Agriculture this morning (on a Saturday no less!) posted 3 more confirmed flocks on their public web site. Kudos to their staff for dedication above and beyond the call of duty!

I added these 3 cases to the spreadsheet I showed in the post yesterday to arrive at a “final” (subject to revisions) tally for the month of January (including the first case which actually was confirmed on December 27th). Here are the results:

I won’t add much commentary to yesterday’s post except to highlight the information at the bottom:

1. The 2-county outbreak area has now lost 60% of its layer inventory

2. The outbreak is logarithmic to date, i.e. losses are still accelerating since bird losses in all 3 categories are concentrated in the last 9 days of the outbreak.

This cannot continue at this pace for much longer; a fire needs kindling to burn and Mercer and Darke counties will run out of poultry flocks for new infections! We can blithely assure producers and the public that “increased biosecurity” will break the infection cycle any day now. However, it may be lack of new available flocks to infect that finally stops the outbreak - time will tell. None of us have access to on-the ground epidemiological information to even-handedly assess flock to flock spread. I hope those “in the know” can honestly tell us all that story someday.

As I wrote yesterday, I hope that independent and university researchers can find the means to look with open minds for all sources of H5N1 transmission and infection in these viral hot spots. While politics is “paused”, it’s critical that those with ability and courage to take on this challenge in Ohio and at the next hot spots do so.

John