Highly pathogenic avian influenza has returned to Manitoba's poultry farms, with six cases confirmed in September, the first in Canada since the spring, the Manitoba Co-operator reports.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) found two new cases on 21 September and three more the next day, each in a different municipality from central Manitoba to the Interlake. They follow the province's first case of 2026, found on 10 September on a commercial poultry farm in the RM of De Salaberry.

Control zones have been set around the six sites in the RMs of Rhineland, Rockwood, De Salaberry, Cartier, Bifrost-Riverton and Woodlands. Before these cases Manitoba had not seen the disease in poultry barns since December; it recorded eight infected sites last year, all but three of them in October 2025.

CFIA estimates that about 551,000 birds in Manitoba have died of the disease or been culled since December 2021. Saskatchewan bore the brunt of earlier 2026 cases, with a handful in Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Nova Scotia, after Canada reported 98 infections in the last four months of 2025.

The agency is urging bird owners to keep strict biosecurity and report suspected cases. It says the strain found in US dairy cattle has not been detected in domestic poultry flocks in Canada.

Photo: Chicken Farmers of Canada / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Source: Manitoba Co-operator