Key takeaways:
- A $2M USDA grant will fund research on the infectivity of bird flu in the air.
- Nonthermal plasma has been shown to deactivate airborne virus particles.
- University of Michigan Engineering is collaborating with researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
Discovering how the bird flu virus degrades in the air around livestock and how engineering solutions can effect that degradation quickly and efficiently are core aims of a new University of Michigan Engineering-led project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This work could help prevent or mitigate future outbreaks.
Detection of bird flu infection within flocks and herds leads to the mass culling of animals, which disrupts food supply chains. The ongoing outbreak of HPAI H5N1 that began in 2022 in the U.S. has led to the loss of 175 million birds and, as of late 2024, has cost the industry roughly $1.4 billion.
The $2 million grant from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service aims to answer two fundamental questions about bird flu:
- How quickly does the virus that causes bird flu lose its infectivity in the air, specifically air found in enclosed livestock environments?
- What technologies can effectively reduce bird flu’s infectivity in those environments?
Source : umich.edu