EU weighing poultry vaccinations in face of advancing bird flu
A panel of European Union veterinary experts today debated the merit of letting governments vaccinate poultry to prevent bird flu from infecting commercial poultry stocks.
EU members are divided on the effectiveness of vaccinating poultry. France and the Netherlands are pushing for poultry vaccination, while the European Commission and several countries, including Britain, are opposed.
“The use of poultry vaccines to guard against the spread of H5N1 will inflict huge costs on poultry farmers, cause undue distress to poultry and, owing to the difficulties of catching free-range poultry, may not act as a blanket solution,” said Neil Parish, a Conservative member of the European Parliament.
German Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer and others have also questioned the merit of preventive vaccinations, saying it would be costly and logistically difficult since birds must be inoculated twice in a three-week period. The vaccine helps prevent flu, but not specifically H5N1.
Seven EU nations – Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, France, Slovenia and Hungary – have reported the disease’s lethal H5N1 strain in wild birds. There have been signs that European consumers are turning away from poultry.
Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU agriculture commissioner, yesterday said that the discovery of bird flu posed “a very serious market situation,” but not serious enough to warrant compensating farmers since the disease had not been found in commercial stocks.
“If there is a bird flu outbreak (in such stocks) there will be support for farmers to compensate for economic losses,” Fischer Boel said.
In Italy, she said, demand for poultry has fallen by 70 percent.
EU Public Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said the vaccinations were not fully effective and still required extensive surveillance.
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