Posted: 4/21/2025 11:01:21 AM EDT
[Last Edit: Mach][Edited]
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First turkey season in years that I feel good enough to go out due to health reasons, ie COVID and Lyme. I really don't want to go backwards in health by getting complications from H5N1. COVID and Lyme fucked me up good. But I do want to go bag a couple of Thoms. Anybody concerned with H5N1? They are in wild birds here in MA, but primarily aquatic birds mostly gees and ducks, but other birds also have gotten it including backyard chickens. I intend to take precautions like gloves when handling and butching in the field, not just dressing. probably just breast them out to make it easier. Anything else I should consider? Thoughts? |
Mach
Nobody is coming to save us.
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Nobody is coming to save us.
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Joined:
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Posts:
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SD, USA
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I hope I don't regret replying to this, but it does seem like you are genuinely concerned. At least as of today, infection in humans is almost unheard of. It has happened, but it's so rare I don't think it's worth thinking about at all, but that's just my opinion. The way people have been infected seem to be almost all farm animals, and oddly enough it seems the most common way has been from drinking raw cows milk. Apparently cows can carry it, then pass it through their milk from an unclean udder. It does not appear to be spreading by blood, which makes sense since it is influenza, which is respiratory. I would think you have a greater risk of getting it by having a turkey gobble by you, than by touching its blood. All that said, wild turkeys are the very last things you need to be worrying about. They just don't get in very big flocks, and are relatively isolated compared to things like ducks and geese which gather by the thousands or tens of thousands, and travel thousands of miles in a year. It's primarily in farm birds which are stuck inside by the thousands inside a shed with hardly any room to move around. A wild turkey which encounters a small handful of other turkeys in a day and probably won't travel more than a few miles in its life is not that big of a risk. According to the CDC, almost half a million cases of Lymes disease are reported each year. Also from the CDC, they state only 890 cases of bird flu in humans have ever been reported since 2003, or about 40 per year. I wouldn't even let it cross your mind if I were you. Just be clean, don't drink raw milk, you will be fine. It seems a real shame to breast out a turkey. Even if you don't want to roast it whole, you are throwing away more than half the meat, and the legs are probably the best part. At least save the legs. |
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