The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and British Columbia’s poultry industry are in the midst of another disease scare and public relations problem after a duck on a Chilliwack farm was found Nov. 18 to have a mild form of avian flu.
CFIA has ordered at least 55,000 ducks and 800 geese to be slaughtered and four nearby farms are under surveillance.
The agency said they were “preventative and precautionary control measures” but the strain discovered would cause only mild diseases in inflected birds and no threat to humans. It is not the H5N1 strain that is causing fears of a bird-to-human pandemic.
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It is also not the strain that infected flocks in the Abbotsford, B.C., area last year and led to the slaughter of 17 million birds. It is a low pathogenic strain that has been in North America for many years.
“There is no new risk to public health,” said a CFIA statement issued Nov. 20.
Ready for questions
Still, the poultry industry was bracing for more consumer questions about the susceptibility of the Canadian flock to disease.
Just days before the announcement of the latest flu discovery, a coalition of industry leaders was on Parliament Hill reporting that they were better prepared to deal with an outbreak but still had some concerns about CFIA practices. And they said they still have financial issues with the government and the agency stemming back to the Abbotsford outbreak.
Mike Dungate, general manager of Chicken Farmers of Canada, told MPs on the House of Commons agriculture committee that almost all layer farms and 68 percent of broiler operations will have been audited and in compliance with biosecurity rules by year-end.
“We take our role very seriously on the front lines of making sure that we don’t allow avian influenza to enter into our commercial poultry flocks,” he said. “The first line is biosecurity and we’ve enhanced biosecurity. We will be vigilant in making sure that we keep up with where the science is.”
Phil Boyd, executive director of the Canadian Turkey Marketing Agency, said CFIA and the industry are getting along better.
But problems remain.
Producers do not believe they were compensated properly for quarantine and slaughter requirements imposed during the last outbreak. There are industry concerns about where and when the CFIA conducts its random tests on wild bird flocks and how information from these tests is released to the public.
Compensation wanted
They also want Ottawa to compensate the B.C. poultry industry $4.5 million for out-of-pocket costs to sterilize barns in Abbotsford to stop the spread of the disease in 2004.
Peter Clarke, chair of the production management committee for the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency, told MPs that some of these deficiencies in Canada’s strategy should be cleared up before the next major outbreak.
“Millions of private and public dollars have been invested in pandemic preparedness,” he said. “A relatively minor investment is required for a few additional improvements. These include providing appropriate compensation for quarantine and depopulation, expedient turnaround times in laboratory tests, the development and communication of protocols related to surveillance and improved messaging regarding food safety.”
