March 3, 2004

 

 

No New Bird Flu Cases In Texas

 

Texas livestock authorities have announced that no more bird flu cases have been found within a 10-mile radius of a Gonzales County farm where the highly contagious disease was discovered last month.

 

Dr. Max Coats, deputy director of the Texas Animal Health Commission, said some 250 flocks were sampled in the search zone, and that all of the tests have come back negative.

 

Now, he said, the commission will extend its surveillance to 30 miles around the infected farm as a way to reassure foreign poultry buyers that the disease has not spread. Limited sampling for disease will occur in that area, he said.

 

Coats said 19 area flocks with links to the infected farm will be retested weekly for at least four weeks, and during that time chicken farmers within five miles of the infected farm will need a state or federal permit to move birds or eggs out of that area.

 

"Movement controls during the period of surveillance evaluation are required in order to regain the poultry industries access to overseas markets," he said.

 

Mexico, Russia and other countries stopped U.S. poultry imports after the outbreak in Gonzales, about 60 miles east of San Antonio. It was the first incidence of high-mortality bird flu in the United States in two decades.

 

Avian flu is a respiratory ailment usually passed from bird to bird, though it can also travel in manure tracked from one farm to another.

 

The so-called H5N2 strain found in South Texas in mid-February was not the same as the one that has killed more than 20 people in Vietnam and Thailand.

 

State and federal health officials say H5N2 bird flu has not been shown to cause human sickness or threaten food safety.

 

Officials say 250 to 300 young chickens died of disease on the infected farm, and that the remaining 6,600 birds were killed as a precaution.

 

Gonzales County is one of the state's leading poultry-farming areas. About 85 million chickens were raised there last year by large commercial growers and smaller independent companies, according to state figures.

 

TAHC spokeswoman Carla Everett says two bird markets in Houston where the disease was also detected have been disinfected and should reopen this week.