Government officials are confident that the ACT Government’s robust measures to contain June’s Bird Flu outbreak have successfully brought the ACT through the worst of the crisis.
Following the outbreak of avian influenza (HPAI H7N8) detected in the Territory in late June, the Government established two quarantine zones to restrict bird movement, including materials and equipment posing a high risk of spreading the infection.
Mr Kieran Lawton, ACT’s acting Executive Group Manager of Environment, Heritage and Parks played a role in coordinating the comprehensive response to the outbreak, which first emerged at commercial Pace Farm, and subsequently spread to a domestic hutch.
“We’ve made sure that no infected material has left the chicken farm site, we put in two quarantine rings around that site and did random inspections of wild birds and chickens that got sick in people’s backyards,” Mr Lawton said.
“We had to kill 120,000 chickens, bury them in pits, take all the infrastructure out, and now finishing the cleaning will take about 3 months – there have been up to fifty people working on it on any given day; it’s full-on, and taken seriously.”
To gauge the virus’ potential to spread, Mr Lawton and his team surveyed local residents through an online submission form.
Surprisingly, over 5,000 domestic birds inhabit the area surrounding Pace Farm.
“We wanted to get a handle on it – to understand, if it did spread, what we were going to be dealing with.”
The Government’s greatest concern centres around the risk of the disease becoming widespread throughout the poultry industry.
“It’s a major problem for the industry – it takes months for chicks to grow into hens who are then able to start laying again, so it would cause significant supply-chain issues,” Mr Lawton said.
The Commonwealth has systems in place to address this, Mr Lawton assured.
“There are Commonwealth quarantine regulations and legislation in place to ensure that there’s state-contributed funding available for response efforts, and also for the compensation of farm owners whose operations are shut down.”
Still, these comprehensive efforts are costly; with Lawton estimating that responding to Canberra’s recent outbreak could cost up to $20 million.
Fortunately, this substantial commitment of time and resources has successfully contained the recent outbreaks for now.
The new worry to emerge is the HPAI H5N1strain, having infiltrated Antarctic seal and penguin populations – whilst not yet in Australia it is spreading rapidly in Asia.
“It will be like a new strain of COVID, coming from the birds that migrate south for the Australian summer – so there is a risk of another outbreak when these migrating birds arrive,” Mr Lawton said, encouraging farmers, hobby owners, and general consumers to prepare accordingly.