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Georgia’s $7.75 billion commercial poultry industry – one of the largest in the nation – was working Tuesday to keep bird flu from spreading after a case was confirmed in an operation in Elbert County.
The Georgia Department of Agriculture said avian influenza breached the first commercial poultry operation in the state, confirming the diagnosis late Friday. About 45,000 broiler breeders were on the site and being destroyed.
Gilda Pedraza, executive director of the Latino Community Fund of Georgia, said Tuesday her organization sprang into action to help protect poultry workers.
The organization created materials to inform them about the new detection of bird flu, including safety information for those who keep backyard flocks.
“From our members, we have learned poultry plants continue to operate, and some have given masks to workers and have set up a nurse 24/7,” Pedraza said. “We have asked people that if they experience symptoms, to report them to their employers and to send us a message so we have some idea of what is going on at the ground level.”
State agriculture officials emphasized that the food supply is safe. Poultry operations near the contaminated farm were subjected to “additional surveillance” to find out whether the H5N1 virus has spread, Mike Giles, president of the Georgia Poultry Federation, said in a Friday press release.
The state did not name the company where bird flu was detected, but put all commercial poultry operations within 6.2 miles under quarantine and said they would be tested for at least two weeks.
The state also indefinitely suspended all poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales.
“This is a serious threat to Georgia’s #1 industry and the livelihoods of thousands of Georgians who make their living in our state’s poultry industry. We are working around the clock to mitigate any further spread of the disease and ensure that normal poultry activities in Georgia can resume as quickly as possible,” Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper said Friday in a news release.
“The risk of an infected bird entering the food supply chain is low,” the state said.
Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University agreed.
“The risk of H5N1 in the food supply is very low, partly because H5N1 kills poultry so quickly, and poultry rarely survive infection.” With a mortality rate of 100%, poultry or eggs “never make it off a commercial farm before the outbreak is detected.”
Previously, some 30,580 birds had been culled in Georgia due to bird flu since the start of the current outbreak in February 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. About 30,000 of those came from an infected flock at a commercial duck breeder in Sumter County in 2023.
The detection of bird flu in a small backyard chicken flock confirmed in Clayton County on Jan. 10 was the fourth instance in Georgia since the outbreak started.
Most human cases have come from dairy cattle
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 68 human cases in the United States since 2022, as of earlier this month. The first human death was reported this month in Louisiana, in an elderly person who had other underlying health conditions and was likely exposed via a backyard flock.
Most infected people were likely exposed via contact with dairy cattle, according to the CDC, while others came from contact with poultry on farms.
No human cases have been reported in Georgia.
The state’s dairy operation is much smaller than the poultry industry. The Georgia Agriculture Department had tested 1,000 dairy cows by the end of December for bird flu and found no cases.
The state this month joined 27 others enrolled in a USDA program to test milk stored in silos at processing facilities for bird flu.
Commercial poultry producers test birds for avian influenza “at every stage of their life” as part of the state’s participation in the National Poultry Improvement Plan, Department of Agriculture spokesperson Liz Rivera-Brown told Healthbeat last week.
They have strong protocols in place to prevent bird flu because the industry is so important to the state, Giles said.
“The most important thing that we can do is prevent the virus from entering the poultry farms,” he said, adding that there is a focus on “consistent reinforcement” of existing protocols.
Poultry farms try to prevent infection by “drawing a line of separation” between the chicken houses and the outside world. That includes measures like foot pans to disinfect workers’ shoes, or changing footwear, Giles said.
Poultry workers need access to health care, sick leave
More than 37,000 people are directly employed in Georgia’s poultry industry, according to the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association. Many of them do not come into direct contact with birds, Giles said.
For those who do, it’s important for workers to know about bird flu and to have access to healthcare and financial support like sick leave, said Emory University epidemiology professor Jodie Guest, who helped with Covid testing efforts among poultry workers.
Guest said an on-site, mandatory bird flu testing system might not be a silver bullet solution, however.
“The best thing possible would be for there to be active surveillance [i.e. widespread testing at the facilities] but also paid sick leave,” Guest said. “If we’re going to require [testing], we need to support access to paid sick leave also.”
“Their access to health care has a tremendous number of barriers,” and workers could be reluctant to get tested because of concerns over losing wages or putting their immigration status at risk, Guest said.
Because many poultry workers, and others, may be reluctant or have a hard time accessing health care, and because bird flu often presents with only minor symptoms, human bird flu cases could fly under the radar, Guest said.
There’s a higher risk for those workers who will have to deal with the dead birds after the culling process is complete, Pekosz said. “There are documented cases of poultry workers getting infected with H5N1 during the cleanup of commercial poultry buildings.”
“All workers involved will need to wear eye and respiratory protection, as well as disposable outer suits in order to prevent infection. Those items will then be decontaminated and destroyed after being used,” he said.
Some of the main symptoms in humans include fever, cough, sore throat, and pink eye (conjunctivitis).
The United States has a stockpile of 4.5 million H5N1 vaccines, but it’s unclear how well they would work because they are based on an older mutation formula, epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, a Healthbeat partner and supporter, wrote in a recent edition of her newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist.
Finland last year started vaccinating at-risk farmworkers, and some experts have called on the CDC to do the same.
A federal program compensates commercial poultry owners if birds are infected and have to be destroyed.
Bird flu has also infected cats in some states, and Georgia is included in a recall of Northwest Naturals raw pet food.
Rebecca Grapevine is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Rebecca at rgrapevine@healthbeat.org.
