BIRD FLU - ONLY MAJOR FARM REFORMS CAN END IT (Compassion in World Farming)

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Avian influenza – also known as bird flu or avian flu – is getting worse. Outbreaks are longer lasting and are no longer purely seasonal; they spread quickly – killing wild and farmed birds.

The latest strain of the avian influenza (also known as bird flu or avian flu) virus has claimed the lives of over half a billion farmed birds globally, since its emergence in 2021. Many were confined to the industrial farming system – factory farms – where they were being intensively reared for their meat or eggs. In these inhumane systems, sheds containing tens of thousands of birds crammed closely together and reared for their meat are commonplace. And, globally, many egg-laying hens live out their lives in cages – each hen with the space of around an A4 sheet of paper.

Respected scientific bodies, including the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), continue to raise concerns about avian flu's potential spread to people and possible links with future pandemics.

WHO'S TO BLAME?

Governments and the poultry sector usually blame wild birds for bird flu, detracting from factory farming's role in the development of this highly infectious disease. However, the international Scientific Task Force on Avian Influenza – set up to provide recommendations and guidance for governments of countries affected or at risk – reiterated in its July 2023 report that HPAI originated in the poultry sector, not in wild birds. In reality, wild birds are caught up in a cyclical situation where the disease, fuelled by the factory farming system, is spiralling out of control. Although reported deaths amongst wild birds are in the tens of thousands, the actual numbers are thought to be in the millions.

Until recently, the bird flu that circulated naturally in wild birds generally caused little harm to the animals. But when it enters the poultry sheds of factory farms, often carried into premises on contaminated shoes, clothes, machines, animal feed and bedding, it can evolve into dangerous Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). This is because poultry production in factory farms creates ideal conditions for the spread of disease. These cramped and stressful systems give viruses a constant supply of new hosts. They enable infection to spread very quickly among the birds, perhaps evolving into new strains as it does so.

In such environments, highly harmful strains can rapidly emerge. And these strains can then be carried back outside factory farms, spread to wild birds and back to farms again through, for example, contaminated clothing and equipment. Indeed, the international Scientific Task Force on Avian Influenza states that since the mid-2000s, the spillover of HPAI from poultry to wild birds has occurred “on multiple occasions”.

Following 20 years of evolution in farmed poultry, the latest, and most deadly, strain of the virus has adapted to wild birds, meaning that it is circulating independently in wild populations, with some outbreaks occurring in remote areas with no poultry.

LAYING PANDEMIC FOUNDATIONS

But birds are not the only animals affected by avian flu. The disease has spread to mammals – infecting otters, foxes, dolphins, sea lions, and domestic dogs and cats, amongst others. In October 2022, mink at a big farm in Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain, became infected. Most worryingly, the virus developed the ability to spread from one mink to another – something it previously had not been capable of in mammals; this makes it far more contagious. If it develops the same ability to spread between humans, it could become a real pandemic risk.

While the health risk to humans from avian influenza is low, it cannot be ruled out altogether, as at least 875 people have been infected worldwide since 2003. The swine flu epidemic of 2009 and the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, caused by a flu virus with genes of an avian origin, powerfully highlight the capabilities of zoonotic disease.

Bird flu has been described by Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, as a ticking timebomb. “The more chances the virus has to jump into a human and mutate, the more likely it is a dangerous strain will emerge that could set off the next pandemic” she said.