The type of ventilation systems in poultry barns does not appear to have a huge impact when it comes to protecting your flocks from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), but how much effort is put into maintaining and repairing those systems could, according to a limited study.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Services (APHIS) hosted a webinar “HPAI case control studies,” held May 31, in which results of a recent study conducted by APHIS were reviewed.
Amy Delgado, director of the APHIS Center for Epidemiology and Animal Health, explained that numerous risk factors were examined during the study, which involved both turkey and laying hen operations.
Delgado said one question that had been asked is if the type of ventilation systems mattered. And when examining the differences between case farms, where HPAI had been detected, and control farms, where it hadn’t, those conducting the studies found little difference.
“We tried to dig into the data and see what it could tell us. Bottom line: the type of ventilation that you have doesn’t seem to matter. We did not find any differences between cases and controls,” she said, referring to the layer operations examined," she said.
It was a similar situation with the turkey operations studied.
However, also when examining the turkey farms, Delgado said they noticed that making upgrades to the ventilation systems mattered.
“We did find that people who invested in ... improvements to their barn ventilation since 2015 were much less likely to have the bird flu present. So, making the investment to improve and keep it up does really make difference.”
Delgado, however, indicate that because of the limited number of farms included in the study, there could be a margin of error. For the turkey part of the study, there were 66 case farms and 59 control farms. The number of layer farms was even smaller, with 18 case farms and 22 control farms.
