Officials say there have been no new conformations to date of avian flu in Dubois or surrounding counties.
A press release from the Indiana Joint Information Center yesterday says in the last 24 hours, 114 commercial farms have tested negative for influenza, 62 in the control area and 52 in the added surveillance zone.
Now birds have been euthanized on seven premises, with another three premises currently underway. They say the depopulated turkeys will be composted in the buildings in which they were taken down. The composting process takes about three weeks after which time the compost can be used agriculturally because it will not contain the virus.
An additional 155,000 hens that are not infected with H7N8 have been depopulated and disposed of in a landfill. The building shares a vehicular traffic zone with the original site where the avian flu was discovered last week at Steve and Dan Kalb’s farm along East Dubois Road Northwest just outside of Dubois. No chickens are infected.
A total of 182 state, federal and local responders are continuing to work in Dubois County on surveillance and response efforts. State and federal teams have visited 1,248 residences in a 10-kilometer radius control zone around the original outbreak location to search for small, backyard flocks of birds for precautionary monitoring and testing. A total of 46 backyard flocks have been found, and sampling is in progress. No tests have returned positive for avian flu this week.
