The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says 43,000 birds on three Lambton Shores farms have been destroyed due to Avian Flu.

CFIA announced an outbreak in Lambton Shores – around the Arkona area – Dec. 15 and placed a wide swath of land in a primary control zone. That limits how poultry and eggs can move in the area. Farmers must obtain permits from CFIA to move animals in the area. It’s a move, CFIA says, to try to stop the spread of the highly contagious pathogen which kills birds.

CFIA, in an email to The Independent, now says three farms were affected by Avian Flu and in all 43,000 birds have already been euthanized.

The poultry industry has been watching the spread of Avian Flu since March when four Ontario farms became the first to find the disease in its birds. Since then about 750,000 birds have been destroyed in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.

There was an outbreak in nearby North Middlesex in November, but CFIA says there is no evidence to indicate that the outbreaks in Lambton Shores are related to them.

“While we do know that Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza is highly transmissible and could move barn-to-barn, either directly (bird-to-bird contact) or indirectly (contact with contaminated feed, water or equipment), evidence continues to show that the primary source of infection of farmed birds across Canada is most likely through contact or contamination from the wild bird population where the virus circulates naturally,” says CFIA.

Farms which have been found to have Avian Flu go through rigorous cleaning of their barns and it can be upwards of a year before birds can be brought back into their barns.