EU strategy for tackling bird flu

The measures triggered by the Scottish Executive last night to contain bird flu were part of a joint Europe-wide strategy agreed earlier this year as it became inevitable that the virus would reach the EU.

When Greece became the first member state to declare the discovery of a dead migratory swan carrying the deadly H5N1 strain, “emergency procedures” to shut down the movement of poultry in the affected area had to be formally adopted by Brussels.

As other countries fell victim, EU veterinary experts swiftly approved arrangements triggering identical measures to be applied automatically in any member states notifying a suspected case of bird flu.

Those measures are now in place in the affected areas of 13 EU countries where infected dead migratory birds have been found.

Separately, France and the Netherlands were given the go-ahead in February for limited regional vaccination programmes for poultry flocks, but the value of the tactic is still dividing EU governments.

Concerns have been raised about the cost of vaccination and its effectiveness, or lack of it, and also about the potential trade risk for EU export markets for poultry.

That is why any other EU country opting for vaccination must get formal approval from the EU’s Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health.

But the measures now in force around Cellardyke in Scotland are automatic, and designed in the first instance to stop the spread of the disease from wild birds to commercial poultry.

They involve a 1.8-mile-deep “protection zone” and a “surveillance zone” a further four and a half miles deep.

In the protection zone, poultry must be kept indoors and movement of poultry is banned, except directly to the slaughterhouse.

In both the protection zone and the wider surveillance zone, on-farm biosecurity measures must be strengthened, the hunting of wild birds is banned and, as the European Commission puts it, “disease awareness of poultry owners and their families must be carried out”.

Despite the measures, bird flu has hit commercial poultry in Germany, France and Sweden.

France recorded the H5N1 strain in February, and only yesterday Germany confirmed H5N1 near Leipzig, triggering the slaughter of about 10,000 birds at the farm.

An outbreak of the less-deadly H5 strain on a poultry farm in Sweden has still not been confirmed as H5N1.