France Detects Bird Flu on Vaccinated Ducks

January 5, 2024 Hour: 7:56 am

On Thursday, the Vendee department authorities announced that field technicians detected an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) among vaccinated ducks in a duck farm.

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In order to contain the spread of the bird flu, all the 8,700 ducks, all vaccinated against HPAI as requested by the French government last year, would be killed.

To avoid any risk of spreading the virus to other farms, the prefect of Vendee has adopted a decree defining regulated protection zones and surveillance zones which are respectively set up within a radius of 3 and 10 km around the contaminated establishment.

Although the ducks were vaccinated against HPAI, the vaccination does not completely eliminate the risk of infection in poultry if the virus is introduced into the farm.

The French Agriculture Ministry said that seven HPAI outbreaks have been confirmed in France since Nov. 27 last year, the date of the first HPAI outbreak since fall 2023.

In a first, a polar bear has died of avian flu in the Arctic, confirms Alaska, writes @himanshujourno

Read more: https://t.co/6Rry2ZnTAa #AvianFlu #PolarBear #Arctic #Alaska pic.twitter.com/hlxpRptO7u

— Down To Earth (@down2earthindia)
January 3, 2024

In December, France escalated its alert status for avian influenza from “moderate” to “high” nationwide after confirming the contamination of a turkey farm by HPAI.

A similar situation is happening in Hungary. On Thursday, authorities in the province of Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok announced that 7,000 pheasants were culled after veterinarians detected the presence of the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

The National Food Chain Safety Office confirmed the presence of the virus on a farm in Abadaszalok, in one of the provinces where bird flu had not yet been detected.

In recent months, over 60 H5N1 cases have been detected in Hungary and almost a million farm animals have been slaughtered.

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that a Chinese woman died from H3N8 bird flu in mid-March after confirming three human cases in the last year in China. pic.twitter.com/Uws0xquyFS

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish)
April 12, 2023