Bird flu infects flock of 800,000 poultry in southeast Washington • Washington State Standard

Bird flu has infected a commercial flock of about 800,000 fowl at an egg farm in southeast Washington, the state’s Department of Agriculture said this week.

It’s the first detection in Washington this year of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a commercial poultry operation and is one of about four dozen known commercial and domestic flocks in the state to be infected with the disease since 2022, the department said.

“It was a pretty long break we got,” said Amber Betts, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Agriculture. She explained that the fall migration season for wild birds raises the risks of the disease spreading at poultry facilities. 

As of Thursday, there were no signs the H5N1 virus had spread to humans or other types of livestock in the area where the infected flock was detected, Betts said. 

“Right now, it’s a poultry outbreak,” she said.

In response to outbreaks like this, flocks are quickly euthanized and disposed of either through composting or cremation. Left unchecked, the disease spreads quickly among birds at poultry farms and causes severe illness or death for the animals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a program to compensate poultry operations for losses tied to bird flu.

Here in Washington, state and federal officials will monitor other commercial bird flocks within about six miles of the Franklin County site where the latest outbreak has occurred. 

Commercial poultry operations in that zone are required to monitor their flocks’ health closely, with regular surveillance testing, and must request permits from the state to move products deemed safe in or out of the area, according to the state Department of Agriculture.

The last outbreak at a commercial poultry facility in Washington involved about 1 million birds, while domestic flocks that have been infected have ranged widely in size, Betts said. 

Bird flu circulates among wild birds and can spread to agricultural flocks. 

The first detections in the U.S. of the current H5N1 outbreak of the disease were in January 2022. Since then, the sickness has affected at least 103 million poultry in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The strain of the virus now active in the U.S. has also infected dairy cows and other mammals, including harbor seals in northwest Washington. There’ve also been at least 25 reported human cases across the country in 2024, none of them in Washington state, CDC figures show.

Bird flu infections tend to be rare in people and typically occur when people are around animals with the illness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the risk to the general public from the virus remains low. 

Symptoms in people, according to the CDC, may include eye redness, flu-like respiratory illness, fever, cough, sore throat and in more serious cases, pneumonia.

Between 2003 and April of this year, the World Health Organization recorded 889 cases and 463 deaths in 23 countries caused by the H5N1 bird flu virus. A concern is that the virus could mutate in ways that allow it to spread more easily among people.