Bird flu spreading faster than 2023 in the EU, data shows

Birds look for food on a field where a crop has just been harvested in West Flanders, Belgium on Feb. 21, 2024. (Virginia Mayo / AP Photo)

PARIS -

Bird flu has been spreading faster in the European Union this season than a milder 2023, raising concerns of a repeat of previous crises that led to the deaths of tens of millions of poultry and renewing fears that it could expand to humans.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has killed hundreds of millions birds around the globe in recent years.

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However, it has not been detected in humans or in cattle in the EU, unlike the U.S. where the virus has spread to nearly 400 dairy herds in 14 states this year, and has been detected in 36 people since April.

Four of them had been working at a commercial egg farm infected by the virus.

Its spread to humans and other mammal species, including U.S. dairy cattle and swine, is raising concerns that the virus could mutate into one easily transmissible between humans and spark a pandemic.

Between the start of the migratory season on Aug. 1 and the end of last week, EU countries had reported a total of 62 outbreaks of bird flu on poultry farms, mostly in the east of the bloc, World Organisation for Animal Health data showed.

That compares to seven bird flu outbreaks reported on EU farms by the same stage in 2023, but was still well below the 112 outbreaks reported by late October 2022.

"The situation at EU level is surely more worrying than it was at the same stage last year," said Yann Nedelec, director of French interprofessional poultry group Anvol.

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Bird flu is a seasonal disease among poultry, spread mostly through feces of infected wild birds and transport of infected material. It typically appears in the autumn with migratory birds and decreases in the spring.

Like last season, Hungary recorded by far the largest number of outbreaks since the start of the season on Aug. 1, with the number rising fast in the past weeks, the data showed.

In Poland, the EU's largest poultry producer, the virus led to the culling of 1.8 million birds, of which nearly 1.4 million were on just one farm in the town of Sroda Wielkopolska.

France, which had suffered the most severe losses in 2022-23 but had been mostly spared last season, reinforced biosecurity measures around poultry farms in mid-October, citing a rise in the number of bird flu cases in several neighbouring countries.

"Still, we hope that the vaccination that we have put in place in France will spare us from any crisis this year," Nedelec said.

(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide; Editing by Jan Harvey and Alison Williams)