New tech to help stop the spread of bird flu

The transcript has been formatted and lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Jenna Liberto:
Hi, Jordan. Nice to meet you. I'm Jenna. Nice to meet you.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
She'll get you all signed in and just hit your feet with the ... you just got to push it down for sanitizing.

Jenna Liberto:
In here?

Jordan Hertzfeld:
Just one foot, and then press down, and then it will spray your shoes. Right on the top.

Jenna Liberto:
Right on top, like this?

Jordan Hertzfeld:
Yep. There you go. It's part of the reason you're here.

Jenna Liberto:
Thanks.

Introduction:
Welcome to Notre Dame Stories, the official podcast of the University of Notre Dame, where we push the boundaries of discovery, embracing the unknown for a deeper understanding of our world.

Each American, on average, eats well over 200 eggs a year. Yet, you've likely never considered where your eggs come from. They're produced on farms like the one operated by Jordan and Thomas Hertzfeld. It's a family business and a way of life.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
It was started by my great-grandpa four generations ago. He started having laying hens, and my dad continued to build on it and now we're here and trying to better and work through the challenges daily and produce some quality eggs.

Jenna Liberto:
Their operation in Grand Rapids, Ohio, now includes multiple locations and well over one million hens. Their eggs are found throughout the Midwest in coolers everywhere from big box stores to local grocers.

Thomas Hertzfeld:
On a personal level. I mean, there's not many people that can go into work every day and their dad's down the office, their brother's right next to them. I have uncles that work up in the facility. So, I think we're very lucky to be able to do that and, hopefully, we can continue to do that for generations to come. Yeah.

Jenna Liberto:
Any farmer or business owner can tell you there is plenty to worry about in the day-to-day. But in 2015, a particularly threatening strain of illness arrived.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
2015 was the first real hit the industry took, but it used to go away through cold weather. And now there's no break. The virus is resistant to all types of weather, you know. It can go below freezing. It can be 105 degrees. There's no weakness right now. And we're not seeing, like in 2015, the dips high and low like we used to. We're just seeing a consistent prevalence of the disease.

Jenna Liberto:
The fast-spreading virus, commonly called “bird flu,” gripped Midwest operations like the Hertzfelds. It traveled quickly due, in part, to truck and foot traffic that carried the strain, literally, from farm to farm. The Hertzfelds scrambled to put in place the biosecurity measures that would protect their flocks.

Thomas Hertzfeld:
And I think that if you walk around our farm here, you'll see that a lot of the things that we've put in place are permanent. In '15, there were a lot of things we did at that time, but now we've recognized that this is just, this is what it is. So the investment in things like employee coops and employee break rooms and walkways and foot paths is constant, and it's something that I think that we'll be doing, as far as I can tell, well into the future.

Jenna Liberto:
Shoe sanitation for everyone who walks in. A covered walkway for employees to get access to parts of the facility without risking exposure outdoors. Paving the driveway and access roads that were once gravel and washing every truck that comes here to pick up eggs.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
When one flock is hit, that can throw a domino effect throughout our whole flock schedule and everything. And you know, it's not as simple as you have a chicken and it lays an egg. You gotta raise that bird. You gotta train that bird, and you gotta put it in your operations and care for that bird. So, when you have a flock that's hit, it can be months to, more likely, years of recovery on what the farmers lost.

Thomas Hertzfeld:
For us and for our employees, this is our livelihood. So the birds are key to that livelihood, and the emotional toll that it can take on you when you do get hit, and the procedures and the steps and the things that you have to go through to clean the facility, get everything back up and running, bring in the new birds—it can be quite a daunting task. So emotionally for us, for our employees, for everybody, you can feel that.

Jenna Liberto:
The Hertzfelds are doing all they can. But the future of protecting farms like theirs is early detection. What they really need is a faster way to find the virus. Enter Notre Dame researchers Nosang Myung and Jim Rudolph, who developed an electronic device exponentially more sensitive than the human nose that can sniff out bird flu.

Jim and Nosang, so we just recently visited a large Midwest egg farm, and they're doing what they can to mitigate bird flu with all the biosecurity measures. They have a lot of precautions, but what is more challenging is early detection. Nosang, can you just tell me, how did you get into researching virus detection?

Nosang Myung, Bernard Keating-Crawford Professor of Engineering:
It's a long journey—20 years that I've been working on it. So when I was ... basically, my initial research is all about developing nanotechnology.

Jenna Liberto:
Can you explain what that is in layman's terms?

Nosang Myung:
So nanotechnology is actually changing a property of material by controlling the size. So [the] electronic nose is mimicking a human nose. So let's think about our nose, how it works. So our nose has around 400 different receptors. So when you smell the odor, the receptor responds, transmits the signal through the nerve, and your brain remembers what that signal [is]. So your brain is your processing power or computer. Then once you have a smell next time, which is you smell the odor, then you can tell, "Oh, that is [a] smell like [an] orange."

Jim Rudolph, Paul Down Assistant Professor of Industrial Design:
And Nosang was interested in taking this technology and applying it to a real-world application. So, we're talking about commercialization. Right now, we know, for example, if they detect, if they suspect, avian influenza is in their barn, it's through visualizing their birds: they're not eating enough, they sound different, they smell different. It's through people walking through the barn, which they do a couple of times each day, and getting a hunch, "Something's wrong with these birds."

And then maybe wait a couple days, "Oh, something is wrong, they're not drinking as much water." Let me take a set of samples, send it to a lab, wait a couple days. By the time you get the results, the disease is spread through multiple barns. And so, I think what we're really trying to do is to prevent that. We're trying to detect it much earlier so that people understand the disease is in their barn, where it is, and then be able to take appropriate measures to prevent further spread.

Jenna Liberto:
Let's pause for deeper understanding. Back on the farm, Jordan and Thomas describe how their staff currently attempts to detect the virus.

Thomas Hertzfeld:
With our employees, they're walking this every day, checking on the health of the bird. And if you do see a bird that appears sick or a series of birds that appear sick, we get a mouth swab. It's sent in for testing. It is very labor-intensive when you are swabbing these birds. When Ohio had it and we were in zones, we had to do daily testing of every one of these flocks. So, you have to come in and take samples from each flock, send those in, those need to be tested. You have to wait for the results.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
Weekends included.

Thomas Hertzfeld:
Weekends included, yeah. And we had to do that every day. But if you see the symptoms, you have to act as quick as you can.

Jenna Liberto:
So then, if you were able to detect even before you saw a bird who was exhibiting signs of illness, that would just be a game-changer.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
Yeah. To know where it's at and stomp it out right away—[the] earlier the better. We could stop truck movement, we could stop employee movement, we could isolate that barn, and potentially save millions of birds.

Jim Rudolph:
In order to be successful, we really need to make sure that the technology is trustworthy and sensitive enough to do what we say it's going to do. It needs to lower the cost of doing business. And then two, how do we manufacture this at scale so that we can put this in the millions of barns in the US?

Jenna Liberto:
OK, let's talk about the prototype. Is that the right terminology for what's on the desk here? So, this is the electronic nose, which looks something like a radar gun. That's how I would describe it. And then, what's different about where this technology is going, and what are some of the challenges and opportunities with what this will become?

Jim Rudolph:
Sure. So a lot of that development is taking place at this board level. Kind of a proof-of-concept feasibility prototype. And really, a lot of the core technology is right here.

Nosang Myung:
So the example of [an] electronic nose is mimicking the same process, right? Except that now, that signal is transmitted through electrically. So think about wireless—Bluetooth and Wi-Fi—connected to [a] smart device, and smart devices could be smartphones or computers, and computers act as your brain. So that now you're completely mimicking the system of what they are.

Engineers love to do the work that is making [it as] complex as possible because we like to solve complex problems, we don't like the small problems. But the thing is that, [the] user doesn't want that, right? [The] user has a specific need and they want to make [it] as simplified as possible.

Jim Rudolph:
This is kind of the next iteration. And this is taking this technology [and] starting to miniaturize it, starting to make it so that you could conceptualize and communicate to others that we can take this technology, package it in something that's handheld that you could take out into the field, collect samples, and still get the results.

There's lots of different types of farmers, from cage to cage-free to free-range. All of these have different types of challenges for how and where you place the sensor because, again, we're trying to detect changes in their ... through the fecal matter. You have to put this sensor near where their fecal matter is. And so that poses a lot of challenges.

So, for example, for really small, maybe backyard, free-range farmers, you can have a handheld device where you can go out and, literally, do spot checks. So you can take samples from different areas, put it into the system, and understand what diseases might be present, versus a really large farmer with hundreds of millions of birds. We can have this continuous monitoring system where we can essentially have a nose "smelling" all the time, 24/7.

Jenna Liberto:
Getting to know some of the potential beneficiaries, the farmers who would use this technology, did that give you a different sense of purpose or a different perspective on why this work matters?

Jim Rudolph:
Oh yeah. I think always. I mean, in 20 years of product development, that's really what drives me, is to work . . . to be able to leverage technology to solve meaningful, big problems. And I think Notre Dame is a place that really supports going after the biggest challenges.

And we see avian influenza and the potential spillover as a problem that's going to persist and could have severe consequences for poultry, but other livestock and human health, as well. I'm excited for the opportunity to apply the same thinking—the same systems thinking and systems engineering—to other problems, but I think this is just the start. It's really a platform technology that we can start leveraging for lots of different types of sensing applications, disease applications, and small, maybe even personal, applications.

You could see this technology being used in somebody's home. Mold, for example, or even if you want to know if your house smells bad, that could be an application.

Nosang Myung:
Your body smells bad.

Jenna Liberto:
Yeah, those things we go, we become aware of.

Nosang Myung:
If we can solve complex problems where that has a clear social impact, that's where I want to spend the rest of my life before I retire. How far can I reach is still questionable. I questioning myself every day I wake up. I say, "What am I doing today to further improve the needle to go into that direction, and this is one of the prime examples [of] how far we went. I still, I think that we still have a long way to go.

Jenna Liberto:
That may be, but the hope instilled by projects like the electronic nose makes it more possible for Jordan and Thomas to imagine the next generation of the family business and focus on the things that really matter.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
The appreciation was there when I was younger, but I think as I get older—as I have children and work with my dad and family daily—that appreciation grows, you know.

Jenna Liberto:
Not a trick question, Notre Dame fans or Ohio State?

Jordan Hertzfeld:
Yeah, huge Notre Dame fans. Yeah.

Jenna Liberto:
So, how? We're in Ohio. How'd that happen?

Thomas Hertzfeld:
Yeah, it goes way back to my grandpa. He was a Notre Dame fan, so . . . The best aspect of Notre Dame, for us—football—is, we all get together on Saturdays, the whole family. We've done that forever. So, win or lose, hopefully, win. That's the cool part of it.

Jordan Hertzfeld:
We're happy together, or we're all suffering together. Win or lose.

Jenna Liberto:
That's what it's all about, right?

Jordan Hertzfeld:
Yeah. We're together ...

Jenna Liberto:
... as family. Very good.