The four pens are usually full of chickens – now they are all empty. Poultry farmer Alrik Visscher from Dalfsen in the eastern Netherlands has lost all 115,000 layers he keeps with his parents. Where the chickens actually run around, pick grain and lay eggs, they are currently being disinfected and cleaned.
At the beginning of August, Visscher discovered the first signs of bird flu in some of the animals on the family farm – just one day later all his chickens were culled because the highly contagious H5N1 virus had been detected. “It’s an emotional chaos: you’re sad and at the same time you know that it has to happen like this,” says Visscher.
Alrik Visscher and his parents live from the income from the sale of eggs. Now the family has to wait until they can let new chickens into the coops again
The current avian flu season has now lasted a year, although influenza among birds, like humans, is usually only a problem from October to April or May. Farmers, bird conservationists and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) all agree: This summer was special. The virus has adapted to native birds and since October 2021 the bird flu season has killed hundreds of thousands of wild birds in the Netherlands alone. More than four million chickens, ducks and chicks had to be culled.
Just like with the poultry farmer Alrik Visscher. “Actually you think you have no emotional connection to the animals because you have so many, but then you realize it,” says Visscher. But the farmers are not only emotionally affected, they also lose their source of income For the Visscher family farm, the loss of the chickens means financial damage of around 115,000 euros.
Measures do not completely prevent infection
Hardly any European country got through the current season without a bird flu case, according to the latest EFSA report. According to this, wild birds were particularly affected by bird flu during their breeding season, especially in Germany, the Netherlands or France. In these countries, the number of cases among domestic poultry is also high. One factor that favors the rapid spread of the virus is the density of poultry farms. And that is especially high in the Netherlands. The virus usually enters Europe from Asia in October via migratory birds that winter here. In the Netherlands, wild waterfowl are often infected first – then the chain of infection takes its course.
Empty barns – not only an emotional but also a financial problem for poultry farmers
Even gusts of wind with feathers from infected birds or mice carrying bird droppings can bring the virus into the chicken coop. The countries try with strict regulations to protect the poultry farms from bird flu. From October last year until July, chickens in the Netherlands were not allowed to leave their coops, in some regions coops are still compulsory. As soon as an outbreak is detected, a protection zone of three kilometers applies in which all farms are checked for bird flu. If a test is positive at a farm, all the chickens, chicks or ducks there are culled. The highly contagious virus kills quickly, as Visscher has noted in his own animals. On the first day he found ten dead animals, the next morning there were already hundreds that had succumbed to the virus. “We did everything humanly possible to keep the virus out,” says Bart Jan Oplaat, chairman of the Dutch poultry farmers’ union. The rules in France, the second largest poultry producer in the EU, are very similar. None of this helped.
The sandwich tern population was threatened even before current bird flu outbreaks
The extent of avian influenza is also devastating among wild birds. Ruud van Beusekom, spokesman for Vogelbescherming Nederland, an organization of bird conservationists in the Netherlands, is particularly concerned about sandwich terns. Sandwich terns were already on the red list of endangered species in the Netherlands before the current bird flu outbreaks. The population was just beginning to recover. This year alone, however, 25,000 animals have died from bird flu.
Poultry farmers in self-imposed lockdown
A solution to the problem is currently not in sight. Measures such as compulsory stables and the early culling of all animals on the farm where there was an infection can reduce the risk of spread – but they cannot prevent it completely. At Visschers, too, there was a stable requirement for the animals after the virus was detected at a nearby duck farm. The ducks there were always in the pen even before the outbreak. According to Oplaat from the Dutch union of poultry farmers, some poultry farmers are restricting themselves, similar to during the Corona pandemic, so that they don’t bring the virus into their stables: Visits to other farms are taboo, meetings prefer to be held online and if children have been visiting somewhere else, where chickens or ducks are kept, the next thing to do when you get home is: take a quick shower and clean all your shoes thoroughly.
Vaccination only in the next few years
Another idea among Dutch poultry farmers: close-meshed nets that catch feathers and other particles that could introduce the virus into the pens. But according to Oplaat, two farmers had set up these nets and still caught bird flu in their barn. There will also be no vaccination in the next two to three years. Vaccine tests are currently underway in France and the Netherlands, and EFSA will soon start collecting data for a suitable vaccination strategy – but this will take at least until next July. It will be a while before a commercial vaccine is on the market. And even with vaccination, bird flu would not be eradicated quickly. Wild birds cannot be vaccinated. And the virus mutates – that’s why it stayed this year: It has adapted to native birds. In rare cases, the virus has also been found in other mammals, but according to the EFSA, the risk for humans is currently very low. But bird species that previously rarely had bird flu are now severely affected. The only hope currently among bird conservationists and farmers: infection, so that sufficient immunity is formed among the birds.
Until vaccinations are found, only one thing helps: quickly discover bird flu in wild birds and poultry, high hygiene standards – and if in doubt, kill infected animals
Poultry farmer Visscher is now trying to look ahead again: by the end of October, all stables will be thoroughly cleaned and further hygiene measures may be decided, even if the family was sure that they had already taken good measures. Little by little, new hens will come back to the stables from November. Visscher hopes “that it happens like with the corona virus that almost all birds become infected and the wild birds become immune – and we get a less dangerous bird flu virus back.” When migratory birds return from Siberia for the winter in October, they may bring a new variant of bird flu with them.
