No one I asked, however—not Murphey, not the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, not Lincoln Premium Poultry—said they were aware of a second problem that Lanc had observed: manure being loaded onto trucks at one of the Gallus-owned barns near his house, within the control area, another act that should have required permits. (Lanc had notified the county, while Barlean had reached out to state and federal officials.) It made Lanc wonder how much more could happen at these farms beyond the notice of the people who were supposed to be in charge. The entire quarantine seemed so slipshod, really: Lanc and Barlean both told me that no agency ever reached out to signal that their homes lay near an outbreak of this flu. They saw ducks and geese swimming in pools of rainwater next to piles of rendered chicken carcasses; workers discarded two hazmat suits in the roadside ditch near Lanc’s house. Lanc said he’d asked the county sheriff to remove them, but when I visited four months after the outbreak, the suits were still there, dusty and dried out by the sun.
By the end of April, as the outbreak passed its peak, more than 37 million birds had been culled across the country. In the United States, at least, the death toll was lower than in 2015, which perhaps suggests that, despite the laxity Lanc observed, farmers have tightened their biosecurity. On the other hand, this year’s virus found new classes of victims. The 2015 outbreak hit mostly turkey and egg farms, where the birds live relatively long lives, and therefore have more time to contract a virus. This year, broilers suffered, too—as have a wide range of species. More than 50 wild avian species tested positive in North America, twice as many as in 2015. So have several mammals: the foxes and seals, along with bobcats and a coyote pup, among others. For the first time in the United States, we can add humans to the list. A prisoner in Colorado, who was euthanizing infected birds as part of a work-release program, tested positive in late April. The United Kingdom suffered its first human infection, too, a 79-year-old man who owned 125 ducks. Fortunately, both patients recovered.
How worried should we be? While this virus’s ability to infect mammals is alarming, it remains unlikely that you, reader, will come down with it, unless you make some stupid decisions: wading incautiously through piles of goose shit, say, or eating raw birds. But you can think of the biblical stories that emerged this year as a reminder that your concern is overdue. Bird flu need not be highly pathogenic to launch a human pandemic; recent studies suggest that the outbreaks in both 1957 and 1968 seem to have involved mild strains of bird flu that reassorted with human viruses. Even when birds aren’t dying in huge numbers, we need to be worried about the flu.