Julio Godoy
PARIS, Feb 27 2006 (IPS) – With the avian flu spreading rapidly across the European Union (EU), health und agriculture authorities, private poultry breeders and the public are uncertain over the right preventive measures to take.
The French government has asked the EU to authorise vaccination but most breeders say they will not vaccinate their poultry..
If I vaccinate my poultry against avian flu, I would not be allowed to export it, Catherine David, a breeder in Pyrenees Orientates at the border with Spain told IPS. If I do not export, I go bankrupt. Therefore, I don t vaccinate.
There are other concerns over vaccination of poultry against avian flu.
Vaccines stop the development of a disease, but they do not protect the animals against getting infected, Lothar Wieler, director of the Institute for Microbiology and Epizooties at the Free University of Berlin told IPS. That means the vaccinated poultry will not be ill, and they will carry a lower amount of virus in comparison to non-vaccinated animals, but they can still transmit it.
Experts have a similar warning on the vaccine for humans, known under the commercial name Tamiflu.
The application of Tamiflu as a preventive measure would be extremely dangerous, Alexander Kekule, director of the Institute for Microbiology at the university of Halle- Wittenberg told the German public television network ARD. The virus could become resistant against it, and Tamiflu is our only weapon so far against a likely human form of avian flu. If we spoil it now, we would need many years to develop new medication.
So far avian flu has been detected in birds in seven EU member countries and around the EU in Turkey, Switzerland, Bosnia, and Croatia.
The countries most affected by the spread of the disease are France and Germany. In all cases, the disease has been reported mostly in wild geese, swans and ducks, confirming fears that the migratory cycles of wild birds may determine the spread of the virus.
The disease was first reported in 2003 in Vietnam, and has since spread across Eastern and Central Asia, Russia, and now Europe and Africa.
In France, the largest European producer of poultry, the disease is known to have killed thousands of turkeys in a closed farm in Versailleux village in Ain, some 500 km south- east of Paris.
The infection discovered Feb. 23 followed the discovery of a wild duck infected with the disease in the same region a week earlier. According to health and agricultural authorities in Paris, the virus might have been carried to the closed farm through infected straw.
On Monday the French agency for food surveillance AFSSA (after its French name) confirmed that the H5N1 virus had been identified in the bodies of 15 swans found dead in the region around Versailleux.
The government established 10 km sanitary cordons around the areas where the birds were found dead. People on the farms who might have come in contact with the dead poultry are under medical surveillance.
The spread of the disease to domestic farm birds is a heavy economic blow to the French, where the poultry business is worth 5 billion euro (6 billion dollars).
Domestics sales of poultry fell by 30 percent immediately after the discovery of the first infected wild bird more than 10 days ago, and now clients abroad have begun to cut orders. The Japanese embassy in Paris announced Feb. 24 that the government in Tokyo has banned all import of French poultry products with immediate effect.
In Germany, dead wild birds infected with the virus have been found in a large area from the island of Ruege near the north-eastern coast on the Baltic Sea down some 250 km southwest to the state of Brandenburg around capital Berlin.
The H5N1 strain of the virus has been identified in more than 125 dead wild birds in five German states. The most worrisome case is that of a duck found dead in Lake Constance near the German border with Switzerland and France, some 1,000 km southwest of Berlin.
The duck showed the deadly viral strain H5N1 in its most aggressive form , the so-called Asia variant. This variant can be transmitted to humans. So far 90 people have died from infection from this virus worldwide.
The rapid spread of the disease despite tight preventive measures has led authorities to say they may have to fight avian flu for a long time. Our measures against the disease are scheduled to stay for several years, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said at a press conference.
We estimate that birds need at least some 50 years to develop resistance against the H5N1, Emil Reisinger, researcher in transmissible and tropical diseases at Rostock university in Germany told IPS. We are just at the beginning of this cycle.
