Pennsylvania’s Respiratory Virus Dashboard shows seasonal flu activity is high and rising, with rates of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) also high but decreasing. COVID-19 emergency department visits have dropped even as residents continue to test positive nearly five years into the coronavirus era.

The Pennsylvania Board of Game Commissioners at its first quarterly meeting of 2025 last Friday and Saturday got an update on a different kind of virus that’s impacting the state: bird flu, or Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza.

Game Commission Wildlife Veterinarian Andrew DiSalvo in the update touched on the challenges of confronting an infectious disease circulating in nature.

“But at the end of the day, there’s only so much that we can control, and I use that word control pretty loosely,” DiSalvo told the board. “This is something … that we’re going to have to live with, deal with, try to be as proactive as we can with — but it’s just really inherently challenging.”

“Sorry,” he offered. “Yeah, it’s rough.”

Here are five takeaways or highlights from DiSalvo’s report, which you can watch at this YouTube link.

1. Bird flu persists in the environment

The Type A H5N1 bird flu that’s circulating worldwide has been around since 2022. There was some hope, particularly among wildlife officials, that “the outbreak would resolve as it has in past emergences with decreasing bird density and warming environmental conditions in the summer,” according to DiSalvo.

“But I’m here with you in 2025 because that did not work out as we hoped,” he said. “Things smoldered throughout the entire year in 2022, carried through 2023 and into 2024.”

Among the concerns is that bird flu is shed in saliva and feces. The virus appears to spread through water, such as by animals sharing a drinking source.

That means the public may not see birds on the landscape around them “and they might get the false sense of security that things are safe,” DiSalvo said. “Well, if there were birds there previously and they defecated on the landscape, that landscape is contaminated.”

Avian influenza continues to crop up in commercial settings, as well. State agriculture officials on Monday listed a 50,000-chicken facility in Lehigh County as Pennsylvania’s first outbreak of 2025 in domestic poultry. However, dealing with the bird flu in natural settings presents entirely different challenges for trying to contain it.

“We can’t go in, foam a building, euthanize a bunch of animals, disinfect it, get money to the farmer and then have them repopulate that over the years,” DiSalvo said.

2. Lehigh Valley as epicenter

DiSalvo detailed a weeklong effort two weeks ago to depopulate snow geese at two Lehigh Valley quarries where testing showed the presence of bird flu around the start of the year. At one location in Upper Macungie Township, about 200 migratory fowl were removed during the effort that included shooting them. In Lower Nazareth Township, the toll was closer to 5,000, including 450 shot by game wardens and about 10 times that many found dead already. The vast majority were snow geese.

“The situation at the quarry in Northampton County was significantly worse due to upwards of 30,000 snow geese visiting in the days following our initial HPAI detection,” DiSalvo said, describing the weeklong response as a partnership between the Game Commission, state and federal agriculture officials, and an environmental consulting firm.

The Game Commission so far in 2025 has received and cleared over 400 bird flu incidents in just its Southeast Region. That includes the Lehigh Valley, which sits along the migratory pathway for hundreds of thousands of snow geese that are proving to be a natural reservoir for the virus.

Rising concerns of avian influenza in Pennsylvania led the Game Commission to issue warnings for anyone visiting a popular wildlife destination for viewing snow geese — Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area on the Lancaster-Lebanon County line.

“For any of you that have visited Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in late February or early March, it comes as no shock that peak abundance for snow geese is during that time approaching about 400,000 birds statewide,” DiSalvo told the Board of Game Commissioners. He noted Middle Creek can host a snow geese population “that exceeds about 100,000 birds at any given time.”

The Middle Creek website includes a warning that bird flu may be present there, and DiSalvo said steps may be required to reduce human interaction with the flock and landscape.

“I don’t want to get into speculation,” he said. “We’ve talked about this. As to what would our response be at a place like Middle Creek, would it be as something as simple as maybe cutting off access to places like Willow Point to try to reduce the chances that people are getting exposed to bird feces or going so far as saying like, we’re not going to allow visitation here? I don’t know what the right answer is.”

Wildlife officials’ experience at the limestone quarry outside Nazareth has established a “game plan and the script to follow” for a cleanup effort should Middle Creek see a similar die-off, DiSalvo allowed.

3. ‘Catastrophic economic impacts’ possible

Bird flu impacts are already registering at the supermarket. It’s forcing farmers to slaughter millions of chickens a month, pushing U.S. egg prices to more than double their cost in the summer of 2023. And it appears there may be no relief in sight, given the surge in demand as Easter approaches, a time when many people traditionally eat egg-based dishes.

It could get worse economically, without even considering the potential impact on human health. The virus has been causing sporadic, mostly mild illness in people in the U.S., and nearly all of those infected worked on dairy or poultry farms. At least one person has died in the United States, a senior citizen in Louisiana who had underlying health issues and had contact with backyard sick and dead birds. As of December, there were no reports of person-to-person transmission and no signs that the virus has changed to spread more easily among humans.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a Jan. 24 update staff are monitoring “multiple surveillance systems that are used year-round” and have seen “no indicators of unusual flu activity in people, including avian influenza A(H5N1) viruses.”

“Everyone’s kind of got a seat at the table. It’s that big of an issue,” DiSalvo said of the various state and federal departments involved in the bird flu response. “And this is a Foreign Animal Disease and it has that designation from USDA, and those are diseases that could have catastrophic economic impacts on the United States.

“So we do a lot of interstate trade of poultry products as well as international trade of poultry products,” he continued. “That industry is going to get significantly damaged if we lose our status as an avian influenza-free country because suddenly foreign countries aren’t going to want our poultry products. So there’s all these things — it’s not just the welfare of the animal species, our welfare as humans and our health; it’s economic considerations that we have to keep in mind.”

4. The flu and backyard birds

This bird flu circulating has hit migratory fowl like snow geese, scavengers and raptors like vultures and hawks, and mammals like red-tailed foxes but hasn’t appeared to have a widespread impact on passerines or other backyard birds, according to DiSalvo.

“They’re an avian species, so they’re susceptible,” he said. “But if you think about the areas of our landscape that they (inhabit), it’s not really overlapping with waterfowl that are shedding the virus. So for the most part we’re not really concerned about this emerging in songbirds.”

People who feed birds are encouraged to regularly clean feeders when refilling them — “just to promote good hygiene for any birds visiting, and that’s regardless of High Path AI, but for other diseases that could pop up,” DiSalvo said.

One emerging theory of the bird flu’s spread on commercial farms, however, is that songbirds carry the virus on their feet, he noted.

“And where do they fly to? They fly to their nest that they’ve established at air intake spots at commercial poultry operators,” he said. “Then potentially that virus gets pulled into the HVAC system of that facility.”

5. ‘We actually are doing something’

Despite the overwhelming challenges posed by this avian influenza, agencies like the Game Commission aren’t simply throwing up their hands.

“That’s something that I want to get across,” DiSalvo told the board, “that we actually are doing something.”

Touching on the complexities of the fight, DiSalvo spoke of precautions like protective gear as paramount to prevent human infections among those dealing with bird infections like those in the Lehigh Valley. There are also practical concerns to consider, like limiting requests for testing of tissue in carcasses suspected of bird flu links; the hope there is to avoid overburdening diagnostic labs working with the poultry industry and testing bulk milk, as cattle also are susceptible to the bird flu. So are canines and felines, DiSalvo pointed out.

“So I’m hopefully giving you a glimpse into how freaking complicated this is,” DiSalvo told the Pennsylvania Board of Game Commissioners. “It gets really complicated really quickly.”

PennLive.com and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.