With the next bird flu reporting season beginning on 1 October, it is still too early to predict what will happen, believes the head of the Avian Influenza Workgroup at the APHA.

However, it was likely to be a similar genotype to the season just ending, which was good news, said Ashley Banyard at Poultry Network Live last week.

See also: Planning bottlenecks threaten poultry growth as egg sector warned over oversupply

“This is brilliant, because some of you will be aware that the previous genotype that was circulating had an affinity for gull species and seabirds,” said Prof Banyard.

“That’s the one that drove the expansion of this virus across multiple different species in wild bird populations over a couple of years. But this one’s predominantly in Anseriformes, from an infection perspective.”

He said the dominant genotype was mainly affecting waterfowl such as ducks, geese and swans, in contrast to the earlier genotype associated with extensive infections in gulls and seabirds.

No crystal ball

“If we look over the last year, it’s actually not been that bad a year, dare I say, and not as bad as 2022-2023. This was the really nasty year where we had the oversummering in seabirds.” There was subsequently a very quiet year for outbreaks, “and then we had this really delayed start to 24-25, and this last year has been a bit more like the previous year”.

“I can’t give you the crystal ball, I can’t tell you what’s coming,” said Prof Banyard.  “What I can say is there are a lot of ornithologists that are looking at this.”

He was watching Europe for clues, and so far, it was not looking too bad. Over the past month there had been 17 cases in wild birds, and no affected poultry premises.  However, in the last few days there had been a breakdown in vaccinated ducks in France reported through the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH).

French outbreak

“This is really unusual, because this is in an area where they haven’t seen the virus since March time, and this is vaccinated ducks, so I’m looking forward to understand more about the clinicals and the disease progression.”

He cautioned that wild-bird surveillance relied heavily on members of the public reporting dead birds, creating a “huge reporting bias”.

“Our wild bird surveillance, it’s not the greatest, how can it be? We’re relying on members of the public to identify dead wild birds, phone them in, and then, based on different criteria, we either collect them or don’t. But the vast majority being called in are big white swans.”

“Anything that’s big and dead and obvious will be called in, which is a frustrating element of our wild bird reporting system.”

Nevertheless, APHA had found avian influenza in 48 different species in 929 different infected wild birds.

Reasons that biosecurity fails

Jack Hughes from Livetec offered insights into why biosecurity breaks down on units and allows bird flu on to a premises. Results from a Dutch study suggested that poor compliance by workers was a big problem.

“A group of farms in the Netherlands volunteered to have cameras placed over their biosecurity stations,” said Mr Hughes, who manages the biosecurity team at Livetec.

“These farms had moved on from having influenza outbreaks the previous year. So you would believe that they understand and know the risks, and they know what is happening. And even though they were being watched, compliance was not happening.”

Infrastructure

“What we actually found when we went deeper and looked into the research was that 97% of the people put on clean overalls, because that was the one thing everybody would notice. But one in three failed to change their boots, or put the boots on properly or use the barrier systems and the biosecurity in place.”

“And this isn’t just to say that people are the problem. It is sometimes the infrastructure that is in place,” he continued. Either workers were not speaking about problems, or managers were not  listening to issues about what is actually happening.

“Even though they were being watched, the cameras just faded into the background and daily routines just became the norm. And that’s how things move forward and that’s how we believe biosecurity fails. People get fatigued.”

Compliance

It was also found that compliance drops when staff are rushed, or making short visits, with shorter stays linked to more frequent bypassing of controls.

“After dinner time, biosecurity dropped by 50%. People are busy, people are rushing around, people are doing jobs, and things start to fail at these moments. When we look at the length of time you spend in farms, particularly if you were to look at egg farms for instance, people spend longer in there. People collect eggs, they spend a lot more time in there, so they’re more adept at doing the biosecurity.”

“Similarly on broiler farms, the longer you are in there, the more you are accustomed to doing what you need to do. The shorter you are in there, the less likely you are going to do it. The quicker you need to get out, the quicker you need to jump out of there, to go and switch something on, you will do it and bypass everything that’s in there.”