Germany has culled over 400,000 poultry amid a surging bird flu outbreak. Experts are concerned about the readiness of the world as it slides into another bird flu season.
The Friedrich Loeffler Institute (FLI) said current outbreaks resemble the severe wave of the virus recorded in 2021, one of the worst years for avian influenza in Germany. Authorities in Brandenburg’s Markisch-Oderland district announced plans to cull an additional 130,000 animals after already destroying around 150,000 poultry earlier this year, according to a report by AA.
During the 2020–2021 winter season, Germany blamed bird flu for the culling of more than 2 million poultry due to bird flu outbreaks.
Culling has done little to slow or stop the spread of the bird flu. Millions of animals have been killed under the guise of preventing avian influenza, causing a surge in prices of poultry meat and eggs.
Dr. Meryl Nass: Culling poultry in response to bird flu is a failed strategy and should cease
Mass deaths among cranes have also been reported in the Linumer Teichland area in northwestern Brandenburg.
“It is impossible to predict how the situation will develop,” the FLI warned.
Most experts agree as they say the world is not ready for another bird flu outbreak, and start to air concerns of a wider human pandemic. If the bird flu becomes readily able to infect humans like the seasonal influenza virus, we could see another pandemic. The seasonal rise in avian influenza in poultry already coincides with the beginning of the human influenza season, raising scientists’ fears that these flu viruses could mingle, with potentially devastating consequences, according to a report by Scientific American.
Influenza viruses are prone to swapping their genetic material with each other—a process called reassortment. That’s one major reason that, every year, scientists develop a new flu vaccine to target the specific strains they expect to circulate most. If a bird flu virus gains a seasonal flu’s ability to easily infect humans, the result could be a novel pandemic disease—one to which people would have no existing immunity and that, scientists fear, would have an even higher mortality rate than COVID did during its initial emergence. –Scientific American.
Most people’s risk from the current strain of bird flu is still quite low, if the experts are to be believed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 70 confirmed cases in humans, and almost everyone who has been infected had direct contact with infected animals. Most human cases have been mild. That’s in contrast to previous outbreaks of other bird flu strains that, estimates suggest, killed as many as half of the people who were infected.
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