Bird flu case was at Slimbridge

I speculated yesterday that avian flu cases involving White-fronted Goose and other species in Gloucestershire might well have been at the WWT nature reserve at Slimbridge and I’m grateful to WWT for confirming that this is the case.  If I had lived locally to Slimbridge I might actually have seen them talking about the case on regional TV too a couple of days ago.

The Slimbridge WWT webpage doesn’t appear to mention avian flu but it can be found here though rather deep in the news story. This case was confirmed in the last week of December and I wrote about it and others on 3 January.

So hats off to WWT for being open too and their website makes the good point that their centres, as with other nature reserves, serve as valuable monitoring areas for avian flu.

We seem to be in the situation where avian flu has a wide geographic spread in wild birds across England, Wales and Scotland.  That doesn’t mean that every wild bird you meet will have avian flu of course but it would be wrong to assume that the only areas of concern are on the east coast or in specific areas.  The places where avian flu has been detected are mostly nature reserves where observant staff are keeping an eye on things, are alert to the issue, and are public-spiritedly sending in carcasses to be tested.  But they won’t be the only places where avian flu is present in wild birds – they are just the places where it is much the most likely to be noticed.  There will almost inevitably be a bit of a bias towards wildfowl if cases are generated in this way.

One wonders what would happen if wildfowlers were asked to contribute shot birds for testing from every county in the UK – that might tell us rather more about where avian flu is.  And if Pheasants were included in the monitoring it might tell us a bit more about the species affected.

And I guess that this is the place to point out that avian flu of the H5N8 variety is not known to affect humans – in fact it is thought NOT to affect humans. It also doesn’t seem to have much impact on wild bird populations. Where it could have an impact is on commercial poultry farms and we have to be pleased that there has only been one commercially important outbreak in the UK this winter – although that will have been economically damaging for the enterprise concerned of course. There are many more cases across most European countries – our geographic ‘standoffishness’ serves us well at these times.

Large poultry enterprises seem to be the most vulnerable to avian flu each time it flares up, presumably because there are lots of birds in close contact with each other and because disease resistance may not be in the genes of these domestic birds after generations of selection for commercially valuable traits.  Defra’s reaction to bird flu seems to have worked well – fingers crossed that this continues.

But every time that avian flu, and yes maybe we should call it poultry flu, becomes an issue I am struck by how little we appear to understand about how it is transmitted from wild birds to farmed birds, and presumably and potentially in the other direction too. And the role of transportation of live poultry or  poultry meat always seems to be played down. Here again is that quote from French farmers which I highlighted yesterday:

  “One needs to stop turning a blind eye on this ultra-segmented industry where gigantic structures use transportation to excess, over hundreds and even thousands of kilometers,” the union said in a statement. “This is the industrialized production that causes and amplifies sanitary crises.”

Well, are they right?  I believe they were in the Bernard Matthews avian flu case of 2007.

But I’m perfectly sure that wild birds, moving across the European continent, are a source of avian flu that could seriously affect commercial poultry farms.  So shouldn’t we now know rather more about how avian flu spreads, through which species, under what conditions, and which types of commercial farms are most at risk? If we knew more then we might be able to predict better when outbreaks will occur and what measures to take. We certainly should move away from talking about ‘wild birds’ as though they were an act of God which has been visited on us for our sins because the bird migration phenomenon is open to study and rational understanding.

Maybe it’s a subject for international cooperation and study; maybe through the EU? Because as with many other phenomena, Brexit won’t mean that we are separate from the rest of Europe, merely that we are marginalised from it.

 

 

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