Life science to improve animal health and performance

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Act with nature for animal care.

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza

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That really drives home the need to have highly effective – and frankly rather costly — post-vaccine monitoring. In a memorandum from 2006 describing a previous vaccine strategy for the European Union, the EC explicitly listed this as an argument against vaccinating all poultry against HPAI: “The use of preventive vaccination requires the adoption of particular surveillance and controls to prevent the possible persistence of disease in an endemic form in a poultry population. These surveillance and controls would not be possible in case of generalised vaccination of the billions of poultry that are kept for farming purposes in the EU. Moreover, the application of the vaccination, which can require up to 3 vaccine shots per bird for it to be effective, is extremely onerous when it comes to huge bird populations.”17

For his part, Dr. Swayne asserted: “I think we in the United States and other [peers with comparable animal health systems] would do the surveillance correctly. We would do it correctly. But I think the fear is that some other countries that are using vaccines now are not doing the surveillance correctly. They’re not trying to find the breakthroughs so that they can eradicate it. That kind of viewpoint is kind of what’s keeping everyone from moving forward.”

The Export Issue

Finally, the biggest hurdle is not technological, but economic and political: it is the understanding that the use of vaccination will cause importing countries to shut their markets.

“I believe that if the issue was not there about losing trade markets, we would already be vaccinating [against HPAI] opined Dr. Swayne.

A USDA Veterinary Services official speaking at a poultry health event in October stated, “We don’t have any assurance that any of our trading partners would accept our products if we began vaccinating any birds,” according to coverage in Lancaster Farming, a regional paper. According to a USA Poultry and Egg Export Council spokesperson quoted in the same piece, reactions are expected to range from a block on all poultry exports from the whole of the country from some Asian importers, to demands from others for attestations that the birds they are receiving were not vaccinated. 18

Moreover, as explained by a recent New York Times article, the export issue has also led to divisions within the poultry industry, with representatives of sectors which are export-dependent and little affected by the virus (like broilers) rejecting the idea of vaccination, while those from harder-hit sectors whose main markets are domestic (like turkeys) are anxiously awaiting it.19 AVEC confirms that the European poultry trade is similarly worried about losing export markets if it makes wider use of vaccination. “We are a member of the international Poultry Council, where it is debated very heavily, and we have also had meetings with WOAH, to try and make them advocate for the science behind this — that when you put vaccination in place, and it’s thoroughly investigated and analysed, then it should not be a problem for trade — but we have not been very successful with that.”

Please consult works cited list here

By Shannon Behary, senior editor