07.03.2004

The first case of avian influenza in Maryland was found Saturday on a commercial chicken farm on the state's Eastern Shore.
Four other states have been affected by bird flu. Mild H7 strains of the flu were found in Delaware and New Jersey last month, along with a different H2 strand in Pennsylvania. A highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza was found in Texas last month.
It was the same strain found last month in two flocks in Delaware (H7N2), but officials said, "there is no known connection between the Maryland and Delaware cases."
The H7 strain was found among samples sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's veterinary lab in Iowa from the Delaware laboratory testing chickens from farms in the Delmarva area.
The samples came from a Pokomoke City farm with four poultry houses and about 118,000 6-week-old broiler chickens. Officials quarantined the farm Friday evening, Maryland Agriculture Secretary Lewis R. Riley said in a news release. The birds would be destroyed Sunday morning and their remains kept on the farm in the chicken houses where they are killed.
Officials said 210,000 chickens on another farm about a mile from the Pocomoke City facility and under the same ownership also would be destroyed "because of the close relationship between these farms and the shared personnel and equipment."
But they said they would keep under observation some one-week-old birds on a third farm owned by the same farmer about two miles from the original farm.
Additionally, the state agriculture department quarantined 71 farms in a six-mile radius of the infected farm. All of those will be tested for avian influenza, and officials said testing would continue across the Delmarva peninsula until at least March 16.
Poultry in Maryland accounted for 31% of the state's agriculture industry in 2002. That amounted to $441 million of the state's $1.4 billion agriculture industry that year.
There are approximately 1,100 poultry farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
The state's last outbreak of avian influenza was in 1993 among game birds on a Queen Anne's County farm.
Officials have tested birds on 828 farms in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware since the disease was discovered on two Delaware farms. All of them tested negative for avian influenza.