Notre Dame Collaborative working to create a device that detects bird flu

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- More than 166 million commercial birds have been killed because of the H5-N1 bird flu according to an L.A. Times report. This outbreak can be traced back to an Indiana turkey farm in 2022.

Now Notre Dame researchers believe they have developed a new tool that could prevent future outbreaks. Researchers say it's like an “electronic nose.”

This device has been in the works for around 20 years and will eventually be used by large commercial farms or even home chicken farms.

Different strains of the bird flu have been around since the 1800s and possibly even before that. The avian flu has caused a 65 percent increase in egg prices from March 2024 to this January according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nosang Myung, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor at Notre Dame explains, “So when you have remembered all the time that we've been working together for the COVID-19, typically, to find, find out the COVID-19, we did the swab and swab it. They analyzed a very similar matter. So, except that we are collecting samples of fecal matter. Once you put in the fecal matter, then it smells. That smell is actually translating to the component going through the different pump in the valve. And this is heart of the nose is showing in this red bolt.”

If the tool can smell the bird flu early, farmers can isolate the source and prevent the disease from spreading. The initial design for the device was complex, and that's where Jim Rudolph, an assistant professor of industrial design joined in. Now a more user-friendly design is in the works for both commercial and at home farms.

Jim Rudloph explains, “The final design is still in development in terms of what it's going to look like how a user interacts with it. The idea is not that we're putting individual sensors throughout the barn, but rather a series of valves that pull in air from distinct locations as close to the fecal matter as possible and then routing that air to a centralized sensor that could be accessible and visible from a safe area within the barn. So that that whole system is still in development, but we have some preliminary visions that we are excited about.”

The model that may be used on commercial farms will use lots of sensors throughout the farm to detect avian influenza in its early phases. For smaller farms a handheld detection device will be used to detect individual birds in a coop.

Mass production for these designs has not started but I'm told there is hope that someday they will be mass producing these sensors to stop the spread of bird flu.