Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, February 18-In 2022, the largest epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza occurred in many parts of the world on record, and hundreds of millions of birds were culled or died, resulting in heavy economic losses. Faced with this unprecedented bird flu epidemic, many governments began to consider another option besides culling and isolation: vaccinating poultry against bird flu.
Hervé Dupouy runs a duck farm in Castelnau-Toussaint in southwest France. Since 2015, there have been four outbreaks of bird flu in his duck farm, and a large number of ducks have been culled. At present, a new wave of bird flu epidemic is approaching farms in Dupouy again. This time, he hopes that relevant parties can think of some new ways.
"The goal is to keep our animals from getting sick and spreading viruses," Dupouy said. "We don’t open farms to clean up animal carcasses."
According to Reuters’s report on 17th, countries such as Europe and America usually adopt isolation or culling measures to deal with the bird flu epidemic, and avoid vaccinating poultry. On the one hand, it takes time and money to vaccinate all poultry; More importantly, because some big buyers prohibit importing poultry from countries that allow bird flu vaccination, many large producers of poultry products around the world are resistant to the vaccine.
However, repeated culling and isolation have not effectively stopped the bird flu epidemic. According to the data compiled by the World Organization for Animal Health, since the beginning of last year, more than 200 million birds have been infected or culled worldwide. Under this background, many governments and poultry products manufacturers have changed their attitudes towards vaccines.
France is the hardest hit area of bird flu epidemic in the European Union. With the lifting of the ban on bird flu vaccination in the European Union last year, France is carrying out vaccine trials on ducks and plans to vaccinate poultry from September this year. The Netherlands, Italy and Hungary are also testing bird flu vaccines. In America, Mexico started emergency vaccination for poultry last year; A 9-year-old girl in Ecuador has been infected with bird flu recently, and the local government plans to vaccinate more than 2 million poultry.
The World Health Organization said last week that although the risk of human infection with avian influenza virus is still low and there has never been a human-to-human case, countries must be prepared for possible changes.
The highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus, which triggered a large-scale avian influenza epidemic last year, has a "criminal record" of killing mammals, including Spanish minks, British foxes and otters, French cats and American grizzly bears. Scientists are worried that if the bird flu epidemic develops into a local epidemic, it will increase the risk of bird flu virus mutation and transmission.
"This is why all countries in the world are worried about bird flu," French Agriculture Minister Mark Fanor said. "We don’t need to panic, but we must learn from history, which is why we are exploring vaccines on a global scale."
Unlike European countries, the United States has a negative attitude towards poultry vaccination. The United States is the world’s largest producer of poultry meat, and it was also the country hardest hit by the bird flu epidemic last year, losing more than 58 million poultry.
Fanor said that France is negotiating with non-EU trading partners to allow the export of vaccinated French poultry products. He said that the EU level is also conducting relevant negotiations with trading partners outside the region. (Liu Xiuling)