Across Europe, many families will have skipped their traditional Christmas roast turkey. Poultry meat and eggs are in short supply amid a catastrophic outbreak of avian flu.
Increasingly, it is looking as if the only way to save the poultry industry is if birds like turkeys and chickens are vaccinated against the H5N1 virus behind the latest outbreak, and European governments seem to be willing to make that happen.
Since October 2021, H5N1 has hit birds across Europe and the US. Seabirds have died on beaches, birds in parks have collapsed and been culled and millions of farmed birds have been slaughtered to try to stop the spread of the virus.
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Farms face tough biosecurity rules and in the UK, for example, housing orders have kept birds indoors for months at a time – even those reared as free range – to avoid contact with wild birds that might carry the virus.
Despite this, almost 100 million domesticated and wild birds have died as a result of the disease since the start of last winter in the northern hemisphere, roughly and .
“I know that the public wants chickens in their natural environment,” says at Wageningen Bioveterinary Research in the Netherlands. “But… at this moment, keeping poultry outdoors, it’s just not a possibility.”
Avian flu vaccines have been effective at controlling H5N1 in places like Egypt and Hong Kong. at the Pirbright Institute in the UK says the avian flu situation in Western countries has changed drastically in recent years and vaccination should be considered, particularly for free-range flocks.
Beerens shares this view. “The only option is to vaccinate poultry,” she says.
But vaccination isn’t a perfect solution. If you detect that a bird has antibodies to avian flu, it is hard to tell if that is because it is infected or if the antibodies were produced following vaccination. Plus, vaccines may prevent serious illness, but might not stop a bird infecting another.
This means countries often don’t buy birds from nations using vaccines. “People are worried that you will get infected flocks of poultry, in which you don’t see that they are infected,” says Beerens. To introduce mass vaccination, countries will need new trading protocols, she says.
Poultry vaccination shouldn’t be a problem for consumers at least, says Iqbal, because it doesn’t pose a risk to humans and vaccines are routinely given to some poultry, for example to protect against salmonella.
The scale of the problem seems to be bringing governments round to the idea of mass vaccination. France, Italy and the Netherlands are running vaccine trials, and the UK’s chief veterinary officer, , says UK government thinking on the issue has altered. “There’s not going to be a vaccine in a few months. But what has changed is this global conversation and absolute desire to explore it.”
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