While the recent outbreak of the H5N1 Bird Flu is not seen as a serious threat to public health — it’s officially rated a “low” risk to humans by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which last week pledged it will be “watching the situation carefully” — the same cannot be said for livestock growers. As of Friday, the Maryland Department of Agriculture was closely monitoring at least four cases of the highly pathogenic avian influenza on Eastern Shore poultry farms, the most recent confirmed in Dorchester County. Throw in two confirmed cases in Delaware and another in Accomack County, Virginia, and there is ample reason for concern.

In such incidents, the treatment is severe. Those chickens have already been, to use an industry euphemism, “depopulated,” their living quarters quarantined to prevent further spread of the disease. Even on farms where H5 has not yet been detected, biosecurity is heightened. Trucks and tractors are disinfected, visitors are kept to a minimum (including wild birds that can carry the disease), and farmers often wear disposable boot covers and change their clothing entirely before having contact with a flock. The economic stakes are too high for any other approach. The Delmarva produces more than 4.4 billion pounds of chicken each year worth a collective $5 billion generating 50,000 poultry-related jobs and a roughly $1 billion payroll.

Again, the threat to human health is modest, at best. Agriculture officials say it’s still safe to eat chicken as long as the internal temperature is raised to 165 degrees which kills the virus (and other potential pathogens), the common standard in food preparation. The CDC reports just 67 human cases nationwide. Wild birds cases, however, have been reported nationwide from Maryland to Washington state and in species ranging from owls to starlings. Even zoos have been reporting H5 with two cases at the Metro Richmond Zoo in Virginia’s capital city (although none yet reported at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore).

This isn’t, of course, the first outbreak of avian influenza nor is Maryland the only state affected. Maryland was hit by a similarly serious outbreak in 2022 with assurances that humans were not threatened (aside from higher prices for meat and eggs at the grocery store) but farmers and their livelihoods certainly were. We trust always-tough Eastern Shore growers will weather this particular storm as they have done in the past and with them the single most valuable agricultural commodity produced in this state. As Maryland’s top chicken man, the late Perdue Farms CEO Frank Perdue, so often said in his TV ads beginning in the early 1970s, it “takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”