An unidentified farm in Osceola County, Iowa is set to slaughter 5 million egg-laying hens to curb an outbreak of the highly infectious avian flu.
"It's one of the bigger farms in the state," Bill Northey, Iowa's secretary of agriculture, told the Des Moines Register. "But when there's an outbreak like this, you have to make sure the disease doesn't leave."
Authorities believe that the flu is being spread in the droppings of migratory birds. The Centers for Disease Control considers the risk to humans to be low; no human infections have been reported.
Last week, 27,000 turkeys in a neighboring county were also euthanized to curb a separate outbreak. Overall, 2.6 million birds have been either been directly killed by the flu or preventatively euthanized by authorities.
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