(Laurielynn Bridger-Stroud photo)

Big birds get a break:

400 ostriches are immune from disease, virologist says and court tells federal agency not to kill them for now

Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum

OTTAWA — Ontario virologist and researcher David Speicher says that those headline-making British Columbia ostriches “definitely” have herd immunity against the avian flu virus and pose no threat to Canada’s broader poultry industry, despite the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) insistence that the big birds be destroyed.

Sixty-nine ostriches died during an outbreak last December and January, with only two carcasses testing positive for avian flu, H5N1. A remaining 400 ostriches survived, but, six months later, the CFIA still wants them dead. Legal wrangling has prevented the agency from carrying out a cull, and in the latest development, the Federal Court of Appeal on June 20 granted a temporary reprieve to the owners of Universal Ostrich Farms, issuing a stay of execution pending a planned mid-July hearing. The judge agreed that the owners faced “irreparable harm” without the stay.

This decision pauses a May 13 court ruling allowing the CFIA to kill the birds, under its policy of “stamping out” flocks where an infection occurs.

Applying that policy at the Edgewood, B.C., ostrich farm is nonsensical, according to Speicher.

“Avian flu is endemic in (wild) ducks and geese,” he told Farmers Forum. “It’s like a member of the Liberal party getting the flu and wanting to cull the whole caucus.”

Speicher, member of an independent “scientific team” advising the Universal ostrich farm since February, decried the CFIA for not allowing the owners to test the survivors for the virus and even threatening them with a $250,000 fine and six months in jail if they do test the birds. “It’s a case of CFIA ‘following the policy’ and are unwavering,” he said.

Such tests “would probably not detect anything,” thus proving the ostriches are healthy and exposing the CFIA policy as “faulty,” he said.

“These birds need to be at least tested to prove they are healthy or not before a blanket policy can be used,” he said, adding, “There is also no evidence that the samples tested by the CFIA (six months ago) actually came from the two dead birds on the farm. There was no recorded chain of custody of samples.”

The CFIA is “trying to cull these ostriches at all cost and don’t care about the image of the agency,” he said. “They are promoting the (World Health Organization) OneHealth agenda instead of using common sense and following the science.

“These are not birds used for food, and by culling these birds there’s nothing stopping CFIA from doing the same to any farm (industrial or backyard) anywhere in Canada.”

Speicher said the ostriches pose no threat to the conventional poultry industry, and he warned about the implications of allowing the CFIA to carry out a cull on the “suspicion” of avian flu without fresh testing to prove the virus is still present “If the CFIA can cull 400 healthy ostriches based off a PCR test from the farm six months ago, what’s stopping them from killing poultry flocks based off a test result from those farms six months ago?”

International figures, including U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have criticized the cull, calling it “a huge mistake.”

Kennedy’s Trump administration colleague, TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, even offered his Florida ranch as a new home for the ostriches, according to the New York Post. However, the flock owners have decided not to pursue that idea, according to the CBC.

Kennedy intervened further with a May 23 letter to the CFIA proposing that the ostriches be spared to allow the U.S. National Institutes of Health to assist with a long-term study. “We believe significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment at the Universal Ostrich Farm,” Kennedy wrote. He also asserted that efforts to extirpate — stamp out — bird flu “will be fruitless” because the bug has been around for thousands of years and is “endemic in the wild bird populations of the U.S. and Canada.”

Unmoved by Kennedy’s overture, the CFIA insists the cull must proceed.

British Columbians are not impressed. Dozens show up almost every day to protest the cull.

Simon Fraser University professor of biochemistry Fiona Brinkman questions why the agency refuses to reassess the flock’s health status. She argues the CFIA should retest the ostriches, given that the birds were tested back in December and not one bird had died since January.

B.C. Premier David Eby is also frustrated by CFIA’s lack of flexibility. “We understand the importance of containing the bird flu and the important role that agency plays,” he told reporters. “What’s hard to watch is a lack of discretion and ability to evaluate case-by-case scenarios.”

But CFIA Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. Cathy Furness insisted there was “no safe and feasible alternative” to culling the ostriches in an affidavit issued earlier this year. As reported by the Globe & Mail, Furness stated that the flock is infected with a novel mutation of the avian flu virus not seen elsewhere in Canada, posing significant risks to animal and human health. The CFIA typically culls infected flocks within three days of a positive test, but litigation-related delays at the ostrich farm has created prolonged contamination risks, according to the affidavit. She also alleged that quarantine measures aren’t being followed at the farm, heightening the risk of disease spread.

According to court documents, Universal Ostrich Farms was founded in the mid-1990s. The operation has sold breeding stock, raised birds for slaughter and processed ostrich meat. In recent years, the operators have focused on extracting immunoglobulin from ostrich eggs for use in human-virus diagnostics.

A current government program will reimburse them only $3,000 per culled ostrich, less than half the $7,500 value claimed by the owners.