A highly contagious and deadly form of bird flu has been killing birds in the eastern half of the United States, raising fears that an outbreak could be calamitous for an industry that was devastated by a similar virus seven years ago.
Since early January, when it began killing chickens in northeast Canada, the virus has been found in migratory waterfowl from Florida to Maine, and backyard chickens in Virginia and New York and thousands of turkeys in Kentucky and Indiana, prompting mass slaughters and import bans.
The Delmarva Peninsula is home to one of the country's largest concentrations of poultry farms, and federal officials announced on Wednesday that a highly pathogenic bird flu had been found in a Delaware chicken farm.
The experts think the birds are spreading the virus through contaminated droppings. The peak springtime migration is weeks away, and many fear the worst is yet to come.
Henry Niman, a biochemist in Pittsburgh who studies the genetic evolution of viruses and has been tracking the outbreak across the country, said it was very concerning.
Federal officials have been urging poultry growers to report sick or dying birds and to tighten their farms.
Mike Stepien, a spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, said that bird flu is not considered to be a risk to public health.
Scientists are keeping a close eye on the H5N1 virus, which is related to an Asian strain that has caused hundreds of infections in people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the virus is extremely deadly, with a fatality rate of 60 percent.
The strain currently spreading across the United States has not jumped to humans, but it is worrisome because it increases the possibility that the virus could be more infectious to people.
The former state epidemiologist for Kansas, Dr. Gail Hansen, said that the flu has historically been the cause of the Pandemics that affect humans. Medical historians believe that Army recruits in Kansas may have caught the flu from farm animals and then spread it to military camps in Europe.
She said that scientists always assumed the next flu would be a respiratory one.
Asia, the Middle East and Europe have all been affected by the virus. There have been 300 outbreaks in Europe in the last few weeks. Thousands of cranes were killed by an outbreak in Israel.
Turkey farmers in Indiana and Kentucky are most worried at the moment. Several farms in those states have been shut down over the past two weeks after officials discovered the bird flu among birds that spend their entire lives crammed into massive sheds. The farmers were shocked by how quickly the virus kills, with animals dying hours after the initial infections.
More than 100,000 birds have been euthanized in Indiana and a six-mile cordon has been thrown around affected farms.
Everyone is on high alert and trying to be as prepared as possible because we all remember the damage done in the last two years.
The most destructive outbreak in the nation's history occurred in the year 2014-15. It cost the industry more than $3 billion, though the federal government compensated farmers for lost flocks. Almost 50 million birds were killed or destroyed to prevent the spread of the disease, most of them in Iowa and Minnesota.
John Burkel is a fourth-generation turkey grower in northern Minnesota. He lost his farm to the virus in a matter of days, leaving just 70 survivors in a shed that held 7,000 birds. The weeks that followed were spent killing the dead and cleaning the barns.
He and his son were advised by health officials to take a course of the drug.
Since then, agriculture officials across the country have pushed farmers to adopt an array of measures aimed at preventing outbreak. They include making sure that mice or sparrows don't get into barns, cleaning the tires of feed delivery trucks before they enter a farm, and creating zones where they can't get in.
The crisis of 2015 made us realize that it takes a lot.
Hypervigilance is limited against a pathogen that can enter a barn on the leg of a housefly. For a growing number of scientists, the real threat is the nation's industrialized system of meat and dairy production, with its reliance on genetically identical creatures packed by the thousands inside huge confinement sheds.
Nine billion chickens are raised and slaughtered in the United States each year, and nearly all of them can be traced back to a few breeds that favor fast growth and plump breasts. The birds are vulnerable to disease because they all have the same immune system.
The lack of genetic diversity is a threat to the nation's food supply, as well as a threat to public health, according to Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward. He said that the C.D.C. has identified more than half of the novel influenza viruses as being of special concern to human health.
He said the sector's focus on containment of infections obscures a bigger issue that requires a fundamental rethinking of meat and egg production in the United States.
Instead of asking how factory farms can prevent infections that originate in the environment, we should be asking how they can prevent infections that originate on factory farms.
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