Britain’s poultry farmers are counting the times till Christmas.
Every day now, two or three new premises have been testing optimistic for hen flu. If they do, their flocks are culled.
If that occurs to farmers of seasonal favourites like turkeys and geese, there is not any hope of restoration until this time subsequent 12 months.
Since final winter, hen flu has been a continuing menace. The H5N1 pressure of extremely pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has precipitated sporadic outbreaks on poultry farms and in wild birds because the mid-2000s.
However, this 12 months in Europe and North America, the virus has been persisting year-round in wild birds, changing into successfully endemic.
This truth basically modifications the best way we have to management the illness, say consultants.
“We need to be able to work together globally to develop constructive solutions,” says Ian Brown, at England’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). Dr Brown is main a brand new consortium of UK establishments to seek out options to the hen flu disaster.
“We’re in an uncertain landscape and we could be faced with re-incursion of this or other strains on a more frequent basis. And that’s something we need to plan for,” says Dr Brown.
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At the APHA lab in Weybridge, Surrey, they check each pattern of suspected hen flu coming from poultry farms and wild birds. They’ve seen a 600% improve in instances within the final three months.
The first step to getting the outbreak beneath management is bettering biosecurity on poultry farms to restrict unfold of the virus amongst flocks in shut contact with one another.
50 million birds culled in Europe this 12 months
But HPAI is extremely infectious. By one estimate, a single dropping from an contaminated hen can include 100,000 “infectious doses” of the virus. The tiniest contamination might enter a poultry shed on feed, a boot or car tyre.
In the medium time period, the trade is trying to the vaccination of birds. But it is sophisticated. Right now, there aren’t ample provides of vaccine. And there’s little real-world expertise of utilizing them.
What’s extra, “vaccinating comes at a cost,” says Brown. “You actually then have to do quite intensive surveillance in your population as you vaccinate.” Birds which might be vaccinated may have antibodies for HPAI, distinguishing them from contaminated birds is problematic.
With 50 million birds culled in Europe already this 12 months, and an analogous quantity in North America, different hen flu consultants suppose the one long-term answer is to basically re-think the best way we farm poultry.
“I don’t think that it’s tenable to continue culling millions of birds every year just for economic reasons,” says Prof Thjis Kuiken, a veterinary pathologist at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Netherlands. “I think it’s ethically not acceptable to do so.”
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Although wild birds now symbolize the reservoir for brand new infections of HPAI, its origins and its evolution occurred in farmed poultry, he says.
The virus circulating now first emerged in farmed geese in China in 1996. Exposure to densely crowded poultry flocks has given the virus the chance to realize infectiousness, which now explains its potential to unfold extra successfully within the wild, he argues.
“We’ve let bird flu slip through our fingers,” says Prof Kuiken. “Why are we doing things in such a stupid way? If you look at the impacts of the poultry industry and the other livestock industry on the environment, on human health, on animal health, what are the benefits of that?”
More thought must be given concerning the most dimension of poultry farms, he says and finding them farther from one another and making certain they are not too near areas the place wildlife like seabirds, geese and geese congregate.
Conservationists are aware of the danger now posed to wildlife. At the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’s Minsmere reserve in Suffolk, a whole lot of terns died over the summer time from hen flu. Now they’re seeing barnacle geese, winter guests from Northern Europe and the Arctic, arrive sick and dying with the virus.
They’re additionally conscious of the potential influence on farmers.
“We have lots of neighbours who are in the poultry business, whether that’s big companies or small farmers with a few turkeys and geese. And they’re all incredibly worried,” says Nick Forster, Senior Site Manager at Minsmere.
“Certainly the answer is not to blame the wild birds,” he says. “We know this disease came out of intensive poultry production, and it would be just crazy to say, yeah, that it’s the wild birds’ fault.”
Source: information.sky.com”