AUGUSTA – The U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending $4 million on a nationwide ad campaign that warns poultry owners of a disease that no longer exists in this country – and has never been found in New England.

The USDA says the ad campaign was meant to be educational, but it laid an egg with bird owners, who translated the ads’ size and tone as a warning that the disease was rampant.

The telephone at the Maine state veterinarian’s office began ringing off the hook Thursday morning with calls from worried poultry people.

The full-page ads, run in newspapers in seven cities and towns in western, central and northern Maine, as well as in 29 other states, warned in 1-inch-high letters: “What is devastating, spreads quickly, and can kill your birds? Exotic Newcastle Disease!”

Dr. Don Hoenig, Maine’s state veterinarian, said Thursday that not only is there no exotic Newcastle disease, or END, in Maine, there never has been. And the disease outbreak in the western part of the United States that resulted in the destruction of millions of birds occurred two years ago and has since been eradicated.

END is probably one of the most infectious diseases of poultry in the world, according to the USDA, and can affect poultry and pet birds, such as parrots.

Madelaine Fletcher of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in Washington said Thursday the advertisements were aggressive “to get people’s attention. There is so much advertising clutter out there this time of year.”

She said the END eradication in Western states cost $170 million and was not something USDA wanted to repeat.

“You can’t be too vigilant,” she said. “We just want people to be aware that what happened in California could happen anywhere.”

Fletcher said the ads were targeted where there are high concentrations of commercial and backyard flocks and are part of a larger outreach effort called “Biosecurity for the Birds.” New England is vulnerable, she said, because there are 85 live-bird markets in New York, three in Boston and one in Rhode Island.

Because of the proximity of these markets, Hoenig said his department is particularly vigilant against avian influenza, which decimated flocks in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and a half-dozen other East Coast states last year.

Avian influenza was found at a poultry farm in Warren in 2002, said Hoenig, and resulted in the slaughter of 5,000 birds.

The flu outbreak also resulted in Cuba canceling its egg orders, just one year after lucrative egg contracts were negotiated. Hoenig is one of a dozen Maine agricultural leaders headed to Cuba on Sunday as part of an agricultural trade mission.

“Maine has three and a half to four million laying hens,” Hoenig said, “with a value approaching that of potatoes or milk, about $100 million.” There is no way to estimate the value of Maine’s backyard poultry population.

On the trade mission, Hoenig will work with Cuban veterinarians to convince them Maine eggs are safe.

In addition, said Hoenig, the Maine Department of Agriculture has hired a part-time avian health technician, funded through the USDA, to help monitor the health of Maine’s avian population.

Because Hoenig gets telephone calls at least twice a month from bird owners questioning the cause of a bird’s death, mailing boxes are being stocked at all Cooperative Extension offices that can be used to ship a dead bird to the University of Maine, where a necropsy can be performed.

Hoenig said this mailing program also might help identify either END or avian influenza more quickly.