U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is calling on the Trump administration to take action to develop and approve a vaccine for poultry and contain the Avian Bird Flu outbreak
Bird flu has been found in 44 of New York’s 62 counties and has forced farmers to cull more than 150 million birds around the country, including 100,000 at one farm on Long Island alone. A new strain of the disease has been found in cattle. Gillibrand said its spread would be devastating to New York’s dairy farmers and could pose a serious threat to human health if the strain continues to evolve.
She said the Trump administration has stopped releasing crucial data on the spread of bird flu and has fired federal workers responsible for tracking cases and managing the federal response.
Gillibrand is calling on the administration to take action to address the outbreak and support the development and approval of a vaccine to bring down egg prices, reduce the need to depopulate flocks, and safeguard public health.
Animal experts are warning people to protect their pets and farm animals from bird flu infection as six million migratory birds make their way across the nation.
Washington State Department of Agriculture’s Amber Betts said with this current strain of avian influenza, migratory and wild birds are the main distributors when it comes to spreading the disease.
She said bird flu kills chickens very quickly once they are infected but many wild birds will not only survive with the disease, they may not even show symptoms.
She says the sick wild birds will fly across states and countries, infecting entire sections of land with susceptible chickens, ducks, and birds as they go.
Betts said the best way people can protect animals is to, “Make sure the water or food we leave out for our backyard birds is under a cover and not accessible by wild birds. Make sure they don’t have access to a pond where our birds have access as well as the wild birds.”
She also said the best practice is keeping your pets from drinking any standing water and keeping farm animals away from fields with bird droppings.
This idiot is worried more about birds than young women who are not being protected agains trans men. If you have a daughter, sister etc you should be outraged. NY’s representation in the senate is an embarrassment !!!