Quebec becomes Canada’s seventh province with avian flu

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has now been confirmed in Quebec, making it become the seventh Canadian province where HPAI has appeared.

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Shiny net mesh smartphone virus carcass with flash nodes, and green rectangle scratched Avian Flu seal. Illuminated vector frame created from smartphone virus icon and intersected white lines.
Shiny net mesh smartphone virus carcass with flash nodes, and green rectangle scratched Avian Flu seal. Illuminated vector frame created from smartphone virus icon and intersected white lines.
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Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has now been confirmed in Quebec, making it become the seventh Canadian province where HPAI has appeared.

No commercial poultry flocks have been affected by HPAI in Quebec, but it has been detected in three wild geese, each in a different area.

Quebec’s Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks posted a message on its Facebook page on April 4 that an H5N1 variant of HPAI had been confirmed in a Canadian goose in Granby, in a snow goose in Saint-jean-sur-le-Richelieu and in another snow goose in Saint-Isidore-de-La-Prairie.

The ministry stated that the discovery of HPAI in Quebec “was expected,” since the virus has been circulating elsewhere in Canada and in the United States.

The other Canadian provinces to have confirmed cases of HPAI are British Columbia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. However, of those provinces, only two of them have had confirmed cases in commercial poultry. Ontario has had three of such cases, while Nova Scotia has had one. At least three of those commercial cases have been in turkey flocks, while officials have not yet announced what species was involved in the third commercial case reported in Ontario.

So far in 2022, HPAI has been confirmed in commercial poultry flocks in the following states: North Dakota, Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Indiana, North Carolina, Minnesota and Texas. The Texas case involved pheasants. 

Between the two North American countries, HPAI has affected about 24.1 million head of commercial poultry to date in 2022. That number does not include that one case in Ontario, the pheasant flock in Texas or another recently confirmed case in Missouri.

To learn more about HPAI cases in North American commercial poultry flocks, see an interactive map on WATTPoultry.com.

Read our ongoing coverage of the global avian influenza outbreak.

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