The Agriculture Ministry said on Tuesday that bird flu-infected turkeys were detected at a slaughterhouse in northern Israel, raising fears of a new outbreak of the virus that devastated domestic and wild poultry in the country a few years ago.
The virus was discovered on a turkey farm in Kibbutz Shluhot, near Beit She’an.
Tests revealed that poultry had been infected with the same strain of avian flu, H5N1, that devastated poultry houses in northern Israel, necessitating the culling of hundreds of thousands of birds last winter.
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Last year the virus also spread to wild birds for the first time and killed 5,000 cranes in the Hula Lake reserve.
Poultry from the affected slaughterhouse were not sold to distributors, and the slaughterhouse and poultry houses within a 10km radius of Shluhot were placed under quarantine, the agriculture ministry said.
The ministry also called for the immediate relocation of all organic, free-range and other chickens to closed facilities.
The H5N1 strain of the virus is transmissible to humans, and experts warned last year that the risk of the virus spreading to humans was a serious cause for concern, although no humans were ultimately infected.
A photo from the bird flu outbreak, with Agriculture Ministry workers burying dead turkey carcasses on Kibbutz En Hashlosha in Israel’s western Negev in 2006. Illustration (chameleonseye/iStock/Getty Pictures)
Other strains of avian flu, including H7N9, H5N6 and H5N8, are also transmissible to humans.
Last month, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority said it stopped feeding migratory pelicans in northern Israel this year to reduce the risk of avian flu decimating concentrated flocks. Israel is on the annual bird migration route between Europe, Asia and Africa.
Agriculture ministry officials also said they were coordinating efforts with those at the health ministry and the nature and parks authority to mitigate the risk of between-pen transmission of the virus by wild poultry.
Dead cranes that were infected with bird flu (bird flu) in the Hula Valley nature reserve in northern Israel on January 2, 2022. (Moraz Brom/Flash90)
Cases of bird flu in Israel are not uncommon, but are usually brought under control quickly by quarantining chicken houses and culling affected poultry.
Authorities said the 2021 outbreak was partly due to farmers’ use of makeshift chicken coops, unsanitary conditions and a lack of monitoring or reporting by farmers in Margaliot, the northern community where the outbreak occurred. epidemic.
In total, the 2021 avian flu outbreak affected 20 chicken coop complexes, mainly in northern Israel, which are home to around one million hens, as well as 15 bird habitats.
Environment Minister Tamar Zandberg called the outbreak “the worst blow to wildlife in the country’s history”. »
Sue Surkes contributed to this article.
