If you ask anyone involved in animal disease response, they will tell the first few hours after a farm tests positive are the most critical.
In Lancaster County, Pa., where the comingling of poultry houses and dairy facilities on a single farm is common, a quick response is even more important. But it’s not just about being quick; you need the right equipment.
A new Rapid Response Center in Lancaster County hopes to bridge that gap, with equipment and technology housed in a single place for rapid deployment onto farms.
The center, a collaboration between PennAg Industries and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, houses air aspiration and nitrogen foaming equipment; biosecurity tools; and just the second fully mobile automated disinfection gate in the country for machinery, trucks and other vehicles.
Dan Hougentogler, who consults on production animal disease response, says the center’s location has already proven useful. In July, an “unusual outbreak” of highly pathogenic avian flu on a Plain Sect farm was contained in just over 13 hours from detection to depopulation, something he says was only possible with the center being nearby.
Jessica Wingate, an emergency response specialist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, says prior to the center opening, the equipment needed to respond to animal disease outbreaks was spread all over the state, making response times longer and machine management more difficult.
When a disease outbreak occurs, such as HPAI in poultry, she says the goal is to depopulate infected flocks as quickly as possible. She led a recent response that took 16 hours to complete from detection to depopulation.
"It's made my job 100 times easier having all of the equipment in one area, having a central hub for the responders to meet and gather before a response, getting a plan together,” Wingate says. "As soon as we have a detection, I know about it. We're already planning what equipment we need, how many team members do we need to send out.”
Automated disinfection gate
The center includes just the second fully automated disinfection gate in the country for farm machines and vehicles.
Karen Clark, the emergency preparedness and grants manager at the Maryland Department of Agriculture, says the department purchased the first one after an HPAI outbreak she responded to on one of the state’s egg-laying farms. Numerous trucks had to be removed and disinfected from the farm, with all the work done by hand under the trucks.
She explains: “So, as I'm underneath spraying, some of the drivers thought they were done. So, they'd start pulling forward and I'm still underneath the truck. So, I was like, this is crazy. There's got to be a better way. I started researching, and I found in Europe that for foot-and-mouth disease, they had come up with a mobile disinfection gate.”
Clark says the department got a grant for about $75,000 to purchase the gate, made by Meier-Brakenberg in Germany. According to the company’s website, the gate can be set up by two people in 20 minutes and works without manpower. It detects vehicles coming through the gate via sensors.
"We went from average between two to four hours to do a thorough disinfection on a vehicle to less than a minute. So, we have time savings, safety, the whole bit,” she says.
Disease risks remain
Hougentogler says the center will be part of a much larger Mid-Atlantic Emergency Response Consortium, covering states from New York to Virginia, that will focus on emergency response training and to allow equipment to move between states during emergencies.
The threat of another HPAI outbreak will rise once the fall wild bird migration commences. Pennsylvania and all the mid-Atlantic and Northeast is in the Atlantic Flyway, one of four flyways in North America for migrating birds, which can be carriers of HPAI and likely played a major role in the spread of the disease in poultry in 2022 and 2023 in Pennsylvania.
The disease is also capable of infecting dairy cows, which has raised stakes considerably in the region because of the dense number of dairy farms in both New York and Pennsylvania being near poultry.
The last confirmed HPAI positive case on a poultry farm from USDA was a 60,000-head turkey farm in North Dakota on Sept. 4. The last confirmed positive HPAI case on a dairy was in Texas on Sept. 2.
Pennsylvania’s last positive case was July 2 on a poultry farm in Lancaster County. Neither Pennsylvania nor New York have seen a positive HPAI case on a dairy farm, but Michigan saw a positive dairy HPAI case on Jan. 21.
Alex Hamburg, state veterinarian, says the response center will help support the state’s approach to disease control, which centers around eliminating lateral transmission among farms.
Greg Martin, poultry Extension specialist with Penn State, says the priority in a poultry disease outbreak is “to take down the few to protect the many,” and do it as quickly as possible.
“Standard protocol involves fast euthanasia, followed by incorporation into compost piles,” he says. “Composting generates heat that deactivates viruses like avian flu.”
The center, he says, allows for efficient deployment of euthanasia equipment that requires just a few people to operate. For example, a trailer with either air aspirated or nitrogen foam can be quickly taken to a farm where someone can apply it to birds inside a house.
"If any animals, God forbid, get sick that we have to do something dramatically, we have the resources available to squash the virus or whatever agent we're working against very quickly, so it doesn't spread to others,” Martin says. "Rather than prolong the effort to where we'll have days and days of individual handling, we can do an entire house covering it with foam, and then allowing them to go within a very short period of time, less than 10 to 15 minutes."
Mobile animal fire department
Russell Redding, ag secretary, sees the center as comparable to a fire department for ag emergencies, with the potential for even more centers in other regions of the state, especially north of Harrisburg where there is a high density of poultry operations.
"The challenge has been over the years that I think everybody recognized that you need some type of depot, right, where you have both facilities and people and training,” he says. “The question becomes, ‘Is that an industry responsibility? Is it an individual producer who is large enough? Is it a Penn State Extension thing?’ In reality, it is all of us.
“It's all in one facility under an incident command structure. So, there's no argument about what, how it's going to operate and who operates it, and that’s all been worked out. It brings comfort to those who are worried when an emergency happens, how to respond, who's going to respond and what the tools are to respond.”