Poultry farmers in Quebec are grappling with a series of outbreaks of deadly avian flu, as the number of birds that have died or been euthanized due to the disease since early last year nears the one million mark.
Sylvain Junior Henrie, who co-owns Ferme La Caboche in Rimouski, Que., said poultry farmers are all taking extra precautions.
Henrie and others farmers in his region have so far been spared, but the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus is having a widespread impact on poultry farming in the province, from anxiety for farmers to a shortage of the drug used to euthanize infected flocks. Martin Pelletier, a spokesman for a group that monitors poultry disease in Quebec, said there have already been more outbreaks this year than all of last.
"We have a situation where you have a lot of farms very close to one another," he said. "So, that created this kind of series of outbreaks." He said avian flu is also "devastating on many levels" for producers who have to watch their entire flocks destroyed. While they're compensated for the lost birds, production disruptions can take months to overcome, harming rural economies that depend on farming jobs.
In his opinion, the H5N1 outbreak should make people question massive industrial productions, which make diseases harder to contain and mean mass deaths if the flu enters.
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