SACRAMENTO, Calif. — To say Mike Weber is having a tough winter is apt, as he explained.
Weber is the co-owner of Sunrise Farms in Peteluma, which has recently seen an outbreak of avian flu — meaning Weber has had to kill hundreds of thousands of his chickens. It's also why he has been deep-cleaning his place.
“Altogether, we’ve lost about 700,000 chickens,” Weber said. “It’s been devastating, to say the least. But we’re all recovering. We’re just going through different stages of grief, basically. And I’m at the stage where I’m accepting what’s happened.”
Weber noted that under USDA regulation, when avian flu is detected, it means all birds must be destroyed due to it being highly contagious and its ability to spread through the air over long distances.
He added that it’s his first avian flu experience.
“It’s never been in Sonoma County before,” Weber said. “My family’s been doing this for 112 years. So, for 112 years, our farm and all the farms in this county have never been affected by high path avian influenza.”
Migrating water birds spread the virus.
Understandably, Weber isn’t the only one worried about the outbreak. Maurice Pietsky studies avian flu at UC Davis and says this outbreak is historic.
“First of all, we have a simultaneous outbreak on six of the seven continents,” said Pietsky, an associate professor of veterinary medicine. “So, Australia is the only continent so far that’s been spared [due to it being an island as well as a continent]. And it’s also historic because we’re seeing it in every single state. The only state that’s been spared is Hawaii at this point.”
Pietsky said since the start of the outbreak in the U.S., more than 80 million birds have been affected.
Climate change, Pietsky explained, may also be influencing the spread with atmospheric rivers creating water bodies where there previously was none, and subsequently attracting infected waterfowl.
Another historic factor, he said, is that it has now started to jump into mammals, seals specifically, which is very worrying. Weber noted how a few cases in humans have already been detected.
He also mentioned they are monitoring the potential for avian and the common human flu to come together.
Due to the virus being able to travel large distances over the air, Pietsky said it can be difficult to stop the spread and why birds are destroyed immediately.
For Weber, he said it will be months till his farms are producing again.
“Once you lose your chicken, it takes a long time to replace it,” Weber said. “For us, it’s going to be 18 months before we’re back to kind of a normal playing field with the same number of birds.”