February 4, 2023, 11:36 PM
February 4, 2023, 11:36 PM
Jose Gonzales since 2008 lives and works in the Netherlands. This professional investigates and develops methods to stop the advance of diseases that affect animal health. Especially bird flu.
What is the impact of bird flu on a global scale?
The economic impact is very broad and varies greatly depending on the countries and regions that have been affected, for example, I will give you numbers; In 2003 there was an epidemic here in the Netherlands of highly pathogenic influence and 30 million birds ended up dying due to the disease and control activity. And the estimated cost of that time was 150 million euros. These are calculated costs in a country.
In the United States there was another outbreak between 2014 and 2015, where the number of affected was 50 million birds. In Asia it is circulating for a long time; In China, Indonesia in many countries, the cost of a disease like influenza will vary greatly depending on the number of property affected, the duration of the epidemic, how many birds have been affected. The costs are not attributable only to the epidemic, where animals are dying or birds are being killed as a control measure.
There are also social costs, if your poultry sector is greatly affected and you have a very large epidemic that damages many layer farms, you have a low egg market.
For example, 140,000 birds were slaughtered, that is, 120,000 eggs a day that do not go on the market. This is considerable, it means that there is less supply of eggs and there is an increase in the price of the product.
Imagine if it spreads further, it could generate bird mortality which causes a deficiency of meat and egg market and this leads to an increase in prices.
How do you see the health situation in Bolivia?
I cannot comment on it because I have not been to Bolivia. I left the country in 2008. During that period I worked at Senasag in the foot-and-mouth disease eradication program and I cannot assess what conditions the country is in to contain a disease such as avian influenza. I only have an idea from the news, and the measures that are being applied and which are those that are recommended internationally.
What should be done in the event of an outbreak of bird flu?
Once the affected farm is detected, it must stop all types of contact to start the quarantine and proceed to eliminate the birds, because this way the infection is prevented from spreading.
The disease itself causes high mortality. If you let it continue, you will end up killing almost 100% of the birds in the area. You don’t want to wait for this to happen because the longer it happens, the greater the risk that it will be transmitted to other production units.
What are the prevention methods?
The first is biosecurity, because this phenomenon of avian influenza that we have is highly pathogenic. It is reaching South America, but it is a disease that started in 2003.
The H5N1 virus originated in the 1990s, then generated epidemics in the early 2000s and began to reach other regions from migratory birds. Later it calmed down, but it continued circulating in East Asia. And when it circulates endemically, the viruses mutate.
In 2014 we began to have a new variant, H5M8, which is the predecessor of this H5N1, which began to infect migratory birds more effectively, bringing the infection to Europe.
It arrived in the United States creating a large epidemic in 2014, in 2015 it subsided and in 2016 it emerged again, which is an H5N6 that reached Europe and caused a very large epidemic and remained in Asia.
In 2017 it calmed down, in 2018 an H5N8 emerged, which in 2019 and 2020 arrived and caused a very large epidemic. In 2021, the H5N1 emerged that reached America and Africa. And something that we see that is new after these years is that it reached South America; because it has affected Colombia, it is in Ecuador, Peru and now it has arrived in Bolivia.
Can birds be vaccinated to avoid contagion?
Vaccines exist against avian influenza, but immunization is a very complex decision. Because viruses have mutated. We do not know how effective existing vaccines are. And the decisions to immunize are not as simple as saying there is a vaccine and we are going to give it.
One has to have a serious program in which it must be accompanied by other factors. It is not enough to just apply a vaccine, first you must start from how effective it is against the circulating strain and be sure that it will prevent the infection from being transmitted. Because there is a risk that the disease will become endemic.
