About 5.3 million hens at a commercial laying facility in Osceola County, Iowa, will be euthanized after tests by the United States Department of Agriculture confirmed the presence of avian influenza (bird flu). This is the second confirmed case in the state, according to a statement released April 20 by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.

The spread of avian influenza (bird flu) through the Midwest along the Mississippi Flyway via migratory waterfowl was predicted back in 2013 by the University of Iowa College of Public Health’s Jacob Oleson and a colleague at the University of Missouri in a paper published in the Journal of Applied Statistics.

Oleson, an associate professor of biostatistics, said that he and co-author Chris Wikle were both interested in developing statistical models that could capture the spatial progression of infectious disease and then predict it forward. “Avian flu was a hot topic at the time,” he said, “and we thought one way for the disease to spread quickly geographically would be through migratory waterfowl.”

Utilizing many years of migration data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Band Recovery program, they created a statistical model that demonstrated this hunch was correct as avian influenza has been discovered in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota – and now Iowa — as well as other U.S. migration areas.

While avian flu is deadly to birds, the Center for Disease Control and Iowa Department of Public Health considers the risk to people to be low.  Ducks, geese, and other waterfowl are passive carriers of the virus, transmitting the disease to other birds without becoming ill. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship in partnership with the Iowa Department of Public Health are working directly with poultry workers at the affected facility in northwest Iowa ensure proper precautions are being taken to prevent the spread of the disease.

Although Oleson and Wikle’s predictive model was developed specifically for avian influenza, Oleson said that the framework is being used successfully in other scenarios including his modification to the technique to predict the spread of glaucoma in individual eyes. Wikle also has collaborators in Australia who are using the technique to model pollutant load contributions to the Great Barrier Reef.