Highly pathogenic avian flu hitting southwest Missouri hard

More cases of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been detected this week in southwest Missouri.
In the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s report Wednesday, four commercial turkey farms in Jasper, Newton and Lawrence counties were affected. More than 146,000 birds were depopulated.
This comes after Tuesday’s report showed 1.17 million birds at an egg-laying facility in Newton County had to be depopulated due to HPAI.
Last week, a plant in Neosho began euthanizing nearly 1.6 million birds who caught the virus.
To provide context on the overall size of the U.S. poultry flock, there are more than 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the United States.
In 2023, more than 9.4 billion broiler chickens and 218 million turkeys were processed in the United States