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Newly Found Bird Flu Expected To Affect Trade

Jeffrey Remick, flickr Creative Commons

A bird flu virus has once again been found in the Midwest.

This time, the virus was found in a large commercial turkey farm in Indiana. This strain of avian flu is different than the one that devastated the egg and turkey industries in the U.S. last year. TJ Myers of the U.S. Agriculture Department says it’s H7N8.

“Regardless of what those numbers are, it is a highly pathogenic virus, which means it is a significant virus that does need an immediate response in order to contain it," he says.

That response includes killing 60,000 birds, quarantining the farm and setting up a six-mile control zone around the area. There are no known cases of the H7N8 infections in humans. Nearly 50 million birds were lost to avian flu last year.

“We are hopeful that as we respond very quickly to this virus that we can get it contained and hopefully not see an extensive outbreak like we did last year," Myers says.

Already, there are restrictions on exports from the infected area in Indiana and concerns that it will affect international trade.

Peggy Lowe joined Harvest Public Media in 2011, returning to the Midwest after 22 years as a journalist in Denver and Southern California. Most recently she was at The Orange County Register, where she was a multimedia producer and writer. In Denver she worked for The Associated Press, The Denver Post and the late, great Rocky Mountain News. She was on the Denver Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of Columbine. Peggy was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2008-09. She is from O'Neill, the Irish Capital of Nebraska, and now lives in Kansas City. Based at KCUR, Peggy is the analyst for The Harvest Network and often reports for Harvest Public Media.