Extreme temperatures make fighting bird flu harder, officials say

Federal public health officials say high temperatures are making it harder to fight the bird flu outbreak in poultry and dairy processing plants.

“Understanding why an outbreak occurs at a particular time and place is a key question,” Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , told reporters Tuesday following the announcement of four new cases of bird flu contracted by poultry workers in Colorado last week.

The departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture have been closely monitoring the spread of H5N1 bird flu since March following the outbreak of the disease among dairy cattle, with many experts, including former CDC Director Robert Redfield, concerned that the next pandemic in humans could be bird flu.

So far this year, there have been four confirmed cases of cow-to-human bird flu and eight cases of bird-to-human infections, all of them from workers in the dairy and poultry industries, respectively. The CDC says, however, that the risk of human-to-human spread remains low.

The four confirmed cases from last week were those of poultry workers involved in a hands-on process of culling infected chickens at an egg layer facility.

Shah said the extreme temperatures in Colorado and across the country over the past few weeks may have been a factor.

“At the time that transmission is thought to have occurred, Colorado was experiencing 104 plus degree heat. Now, the barns in which culling operations occur were, no doubt, even hotter,” said Shah, noting the heat makes wearing personal protective equipment “a challenge.”

Shah also said the use of industrial fans to keep barns cool tends to circulate loose feathers, which are known spreaders of the virus.

The culling method for the chickens may have also contributed to the infections.

The process, which is common on many farms to depopulate chickens as humanely and efficiently as possible, involves picking up individual infected birds and placing them in a cart equipped with carbon dioxide gassing technology.

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“The cart can hold several dozen chickens, typically, so it’s a very manual, difficult, laborious process to pick up each chicken and put it in the cart,” Julie Gauthier, an official for Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at USDA, told reporters. “There's a lot of hands on them to do this method.”

Shah said both the temperature and culling method “highlight a pathway for prevention,” including the systematic use of PPE and “engineering controls to help reduce exposure risk.”