Crescent Duck Farm owner: USDA lifts 10-KM quarantine after bird-flu outbreak

The USDA has lifted one of two quarantines around Long Island's last commercial duck farm, according to the North Fork farmer impacted by the order, as the nation's top health official ponders an unorthodox approach to eradicating the disease. 

Doug Corwin, president of Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue, in an interview Thursday said the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently notified him it had lifted one quarantine on live poultry in a 10-kilometer range around his operation. But a second quarantine specific to his farm remained in place, he said, and could remain into the spring.

A USDA spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Corwin, who was forced to euthanize more than 99,000 of his ducks after a bird-flu outbreak at his farm in January, said he has worked methodically in the weeks since to sanitize his farm in the hopes of returning about 3,700 young ducks salvaged remotely from eggs to restart operations. That could happen in around two months, he said, pending lifting of the second quarantine. 

"Barns are being disinfected and fumigated over and over again," he said, describing the work as "slow but steady." Crescent was forced to lay off nearly 48 workers after the outbreak, but 20 remain for the cleanup. 

Corwin's hopes for a restart come as U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been quoted in national media as suggesting that bird flu can be eradicated by developing resistant flocks.

Noting that culling operations have resulted in the euthanizing of about 166 million chickens in the latest bird-flu outbreak, Kennedy told Fox News host Sean Hannity, "Most of our scientists are against the culling operation."

Instead, Kennedy said, flocks identified as infected should be isolated and "let the disease go through them and identify the birds that survive, which are the birds that probably have a genetic inclination for immunity. And those should be the birds that we breed ..."

Experts have pounced on the idea, and Corwin said he shared their concern. 

Corwin, a Cornell University graduate who sits on Cornell’s Avian Advisory committee and has been president of the Cornell Duck Research Laboratory on Long Island since 1986, said Kennedy’s idea might sound good theoretically, but had the potential to be "devastating" if it got out of control.

"Biologically, yes, what he’s saying isn’t wrong, but it will only make prices much, much worse and jeopardize basic food supplies," Corwin said. The problem is bird flu spreads quickly and deeply in commercial flocks. His own farm had "phenomenal virus loads" in a matter of days at the height of the outbreak.

"I’ve seen how contagious and virulent this disease is," he said. "I’ve never seen anything like it." Attempting to isolate infected flocks and identify resistant poultry on a large scale, Corwin said, is "only going to make the problem extremely worse." Egg prices would go through the roof, he suggested.

Even if resistant birds were identified, he said, "You’re not going to reproduce those birds" into resistant flocks "overnight." It takes six months to breed new generations of resistant birds to sexual maturity and grow on a larger scale, as Corwin himself is doing with his recent hatchlings.

That said, Corwin said, if the USDA wanted to conduct a small-scale test for immunity on an abandoned farm sequestered from wild birds that could spread it, "God bless them."

Corwin has been vocal in his support for a vaccine to immunize flocks.

But Kennedy told Fox News that "all of my agencies have advised against vaccination," despite the USDA’s recent conditional approval of a vaccine against a certain strain of the disease. That vaccine is not commercially available and the agency has no schedule to release it.

Corwin has reached out to local and federal lawmakers, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, to advocate for a vaccine to be commercially available.

"Without a vaccine, this disease is so endemic and spread so widely that there’s no easy way out of this," he said.

Earlier this month, avian flu was detected at several live markets in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. That comes several weeks after Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered a temporary shut  down and cleaning of all live markets on Long Island, in New York City and Westchester in an effort to prevent more spread of the disease.

On Thursday, the USDA announced it plans to award up to $100 million to companies that come up with new prevention strategies, research and possible vaccines to help control bird flu HPAI on farms and ranches.

Livestock producers, manufacturers of vaccines, universities and other for-profit groups can apply for the funding through a competitive process, officials said.