Long Island farm forced to kill entire flock of 100,000 ducks amid bird flu outbreak
AQUEBOGUE, Long Island (WABC) -- A bird flu outbreak is having a devastating impact on Suffolk County's largest and last commercial duck farm.
The H5N1 outbreak at Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue has forced the farm to cease operations and begin to euthanize its entire flock of more than 100,000 ducks.
The outbreak was confirmed on Jan 17.
"Unfortunately, when you have a situation like this where you have a flock that's infected, the remedy is to put the entire flock down," said Suffolk County Health Commissioner Dr. Gregson Pigott.
Despite the havoc it is wreaking on the farm, health officials say the risk of the public getting sick is minimal.
"Yes, we've seen sporadic cases, but even in those sporadic cases, it hasn't gone to the rest of their families, to the rest of their contacts, so it's really not getting into our human hosts," said Dr. Sharon Nachman with Stony Brook Children's Hospital.
Crescent Duck Farm is family owned and has operated in Suffolk County since 1908. For owner Doug Corwin, it's the loss of an entire life's work.
Eyewitness News profiled the farm back in 2019, but since then, the COVID pandemic happened and the concern now is that bird flu doesn't somehow trigger another pandemic.
It will take about a week to euthanize all those ducks.
"And if this disease mutates like in a factory farm to infect workers, to infect humans, to get human-to-human transmission, we're looking at the next pandemic," said John Di Leonardo with Humane Long Island.
Health officials are reminding people that so far there has been no human-to-human spread, but officials are still taking precautions in Aquebogue
"We're gonna test them for H5N1, and we're also gonna offer what they call prophylactic measures, in this case Tamiflu and Tamivir," Pigott said.
Bird flu has been detected in wild birds and poultry in New York since 2022.
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