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Chicken, Egg Companies Spar Over Bird-Flu Vaccinations
The chicken and egg industries are at odds. The argument isn’t over which came first but about bird-flu vaccinations. Egg companies are calling for a stronger government response to the bird flu outbreak with the virus roiling farms and sending egg prices soaring. They are also petitioning regulators to greenlight a vaccine that could be administered on farms, a sharp reversal from their position a few years ago.
“The path that we’re on right now isn’t sustainable for the industry,” said Dr. Craig Rowles, vaccine adviser to an industry trade group and science chief at Versova, one of the largest U.S. egg producers. “It’s not sustainable for our customers who are buying $8 eggs now.” Companies that process chickens for meat, including Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride and Perdue Farms, are saying not so fast. Bird-flu vaccinations, they said, could embroil their export business — worth roughly $5 billion annually.
If the U.S. began vaccinating flocks, countries that import chicken products would cut off purchases of American poultry, officials said. Each country would need to sign off on the U.S.’s vaccination strategy before accepting imports again. “Vaccination would have a devastating impact,” said Harrison Kircher, president of the National Chicken Council, the trade group for poultry processors, in a statement this month.
Bird Flu Outbreak Tests New U.S. Agriculture Secretary as Texas Farmers Remain on Edge
Newly confirmed U.S. Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins is facing an early test as she leads the effort to tamp down on the country’s bird flu outbreak, which has decimated dairy and poultry farmers across the country.
So far it has mostly spared Texas, but farmers in the state are on edge, keeping a close eye out for alerts of outbreaks at nearby farms and taking extraordinary steps to protect their animals, from locking down farms to requiring shoe and clothing changes for anyone going in. The crisis has also driven egg prices to record levels nationwide.
“Most of the time, these diseases will die out over time,” said J.C. Essler, executive vice president of the Texas Poultry Federation in Round Rock. “We haven’t been able to completely eradicate this one.”
At her confirmation hearing last month, Rollins, a native Texan and former president of the America First Policy Institute, said she was “hyper focused” on assembling a team to address the outbreak. Less than a week after being confirmed, however, her plan to curtail the spread of avian flu remains unclear.
Bird Flu May Spread Through the Air, Study Finds
The highly contagious H5N1 bird flu virus may be spreading through the air under certain conditions, according to a new study from the Czech Republic. Government veterinarians made the discovery while investigating a mysterious outbreak at a highly secured chicken farm last February.
The farm had strict biosecurity measures — filtered well water, one-way airflow fans and fencing to keep wild animals out. Yet, the virus still infected the flock, causing thousands of bird deaths. The likely culprit? Wind.
Dr. Kamil Sedlak, senior study author and director of the State Veterinary Institute in Prague, said that after all the possibilities were explored, windborne spread was most likely cause in this case, CNN reported. Experts traced the virus back to a duck farm nearly five miles west of the chicken facility. The duck farm, near a lake that hosted wildlife, had far less biosecurity and had been hit by a massive outbreak days earlier.
Bird flu swept through the duck farm rapidly — 800 ducks died on the first day. Within two days, 5,000 had died. A few days later, the entire 50,000-bird flock was culled to contain the outbreak.
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U.S. Approves Conditional Use of Avian Influenza Vaccine Amid Spreading Outbreak
As H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza spreads for over a year, mainly among migratory birds, chickens, ducks, and dairy cattle in the United States, a plan is underway to directly vaccinate birds.
Last month, a case of death from H5N1 infection in the U.S. marked the first such instance, increasing fears of a pandemic, prompting the government’s response.
Zoetis, a U.S. animal health company, announced on Nov. 14 that it received conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for its avian influenza vaccine.
Conditional approval is a system that allows temporary use of medications that demonstrate safety and similar efficacy when no emergency medications are available. If preventive effects are proven within a year, formal approval can be obtained to proceed with sales.
Will the Egg Shortage Affect Flu Shots?
While millions of vaccine doses are made using chicken eggs each year, experts say the current egg shortage won’t hamper next year’s flu vaccine production cycle.
Previous bird flu outbreaks and decades-old public health infrastructure have led industry to protect the hens used for vaccine production, experts told MedPage Today.
Moreover, flu vaccines that don’t require eggs are available, and mRNA-based flu shots are in development. William Schaffner, MD, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, said that during a bird flu scare about 20 years ago, “it became clear that the entire egg production had to be … protected from wild bird contamination.”
“The manufacturers who use eggs to produce influenza vaccine control very, very carefully the supply of eggs and the hens that produce them,” Schaffner told MedPage Today. Indeed, a Sanofi spokesperson told MedPage Today that the eggs used to manufacture vaccines are pharmaceutical grade and produced in a controlled environment.
