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Reuters reports that previous avian influenza outbreaks in Europe have seen tens of millions of birds culled and significant economic losses for poultry farmers.
To date, the disease has been found in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden and, for the first time this week in Croatia, Slovenia and Poland, after severely affecting Russia, Kazakhstan and Israel. .
The vast majority of cases involve wild bird migration, but outbreaks have been reported on farms, leading to the death or culling of at least 1.6 million chickens and ducks in the region.
In the Netherlands, Europe’s largest exporter of chicken meat and eggs, nearly 500,000 chickens died or were culled from the virus this fall and more than 900,000 chickens died on a single farm in Poland this week, ministries said. countries.
“The risk of a relocation to poultry farms and more cases among wild birds is greater than in the last two years due to the massive emergence of various avian influenza viruses in Europe,” a spokeswoman for the Friedrich Institute said. Loeffler, the German federal animal disease research agency.
The death toll of poultry in Russia reached 1.8 million at the end of October, including nearly 1.6 million in a farm near Kazakhstan, figures from the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) show.
The main strain found in Europe this year is H5N8, which decimated flocks in 2016/17, when the region recorded its largest outbreak of poultry and wild birds, but H5N5 and H5N1 were also reported.
Although the risk to humans is low, the European Food Safety Agency EFSA said this week that the evolution of the virus needs to be closely monitored. A strain of H5N1 is known to have spread to humans.
EU poultry operators have said they are very concerned about the latest outbreak, but now they have experience dealing with it.
“We have worked so hard to improve safety, train farmers and improve traceability that we hope that if there are cases we will be able to contain them,” said Anne Richard, head of the French poultry industry lobby ANVOL.
Most counties have raised their alert status to “high,” which implies that poultry and birds of all types must be kept indoors or protected to avoid contact with wild birds.
Outbreaks of avian flu like other animal diseases often prompt importing countries to impose trade restrictions.
This will add to the coronavirus-related lockdowns that threaten to hold back year-end holiday sales.
“It is already difficult to export with COVID, it would make things worse,” Denis Lambert, CEO of France’s largest poultry group LDC, told reporters Wednesday.
However, the approach of importing countries to limit restrictions to virus-affected regions should help mitigate the impact.
China, for example, has suspended imports of poultry products from four regions of Russia due to bird flu, TASS news agency reported on Wednesday 25 November.
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