Kansas agriculture officials warn of rising HPAI detections, outline response gaps for screw worm and rabies

Dr. Justin Smith, state animal health official, told the Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources that Kansas continues to track highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and other foreign-animal-disease threats and is working to shore up surveillance, testing and response capacity.

"HPAI is a multispecies disease," Smith said, noting the virus has been present nationally since 2022 and that Kansas had not reported a confirmed dairy-cattle case since March 2024. He said Kansas participated in the national milk-testing strategy and that recent positives have concentrated in game-bird facilities and a single large commercial operation that held about 360,000 birds and materially affected the state's USDA status.

The department provided a 30-day snapshot showing 12 affected premises in 10 counties; red counties indicate active control areas, yellow show recently released control areas and green indicate previously released areas. Smith explained that quarantines remain on facilities and in some cases can prevent repopulation for up to 120 days, while commercial positives typically trigger expanded control areas and more intensive regional surveillance.

Smith outlined field response steps after a positive laboratory result: issue a quarantine, deploy staff to document bird numbers, eggs and feed (which affect indemnity calculations), develop depopulation and disposal plans, and conduct surveillance in the surrounding control area. "Disposal is getting to be as big of an issue as anything," he said, describing difficulty finding burial sites in some regions and the need to explore alternatives with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

The state has rolled out a GIS-based public reporting tool that lets producers enter an address to see whether they are in a surveillance area and receive follow-up instructions. Smith said the tool has improved self-reporting and outreach to backyard flocks.

On the approaching threat from New World screw worm, Smith said the fly's maggot stage consumes living flesh (unlike domestic blowfly maggots), making the pest economically and biologically serious. He reported recent detections in Mexico — including eight cases cited in Tamaulipas — and argued the primary risk pathway is wildlife incursion or inadvertent transport rather than port commerce.

Smith warned Kansas lacks domestic sterile-fly production and sufficient approved pharmaceuticals for rapid mass response. He cited a single sterile-fly production facility in Panama that produces about 100 million flies per week and said that capacity is "a drop in the bucket" relative to need. Historically, sterile-fly releases helped eradicate screw worm from the U.S. in the 1950s–60s; Smith said those domestic production capabilities no longer exist in the United States.

He described planned response zones if screw worm were detected: an infested zone and adjacent surveillance/trapping zones that would require intensive inspections and movement restrictions. (Transcript remarks about zone size contained inconsistent unit conversions; the briefing referenced "20 kilometers" alongside multiple mile-based descriptions — see clarifying details.)

On rabies, Smith said the disease remains reportable and that bats and skunks are primary wildlife vectors in Kansas. He noted recent domestic positives, including a dog in south-central Kansas that exposed people and prompted prophylactic treatment for contacts, and described quarantine protocols for exposed livestock.

Committee members pressed Smith on resource and policy gaps. Smith told Representative Gardner that state cooperative-agreement funding from USDA has been effectively flat for a decade and that current staffing (he cited four field veterinarians under his supervision) and indemnity tables are inadequate for a major outbreak. "If we have an outbreak, no — it's not enough," he said of current resources, adding that indemnity rates and coverage for lost production lag industry needs.

Smith described EMBERS, a recent full-scale exercise, which modeled a moderate outbreak five weeks in and estimated surge needs (in one scenario) exceeding 1,000 on-the-ground responders and hundreds of thousands of laboratory tests. The exercise highlighted gaps in surge labor, testing volume and data flow between labs and response teams.

The committee thanked Smith for the briefing. Smith said the department is drafting an after-action report from the exercise and invited members to follow up.

The presentation did not include formal votes or policy changes; committee members were scheduled to consider bill introductions at the next meeting.