STRATEGY ▶▶▶
‘Risk based bird flu mitigation’
Preventing avian influenza outbreaks starts with good situational awareness. That is why Utrecht University is plotting all the risk indicators together in a risk model. After completing a digital risk map for the Netherlands, they are now working on a European version.
BY DICK VAN DOORN
The risk maps for bird flu have already been completed for the Netherlands Dr Fred de Boer is planning to make maps of the risk areas for Europe, too.
I
n the summer of 2021 Dr Janneke Schreuder, veterinarian and epidemiologist at Utrecht University, obtained her doctorate on a broader approach to preventing bird flu. “This project is part of our general research theme here at
Utrecht University that focuses on infectious diseases in ani- mals,” says Professor Arjan Stegeman, who supervised Jan- neke Schreuder’s PhD thesis. Stegeman chairs the Farm Ani- mal Health division at Utrecht University. Utrecht University has been conducting research into avian influenza since 2003 when the first major bird flu outbreak hit the Netherlands. Stegeman: “In that particular outbreak the disease started as a low pathogenic virus variant, inducing mild disease on one
farm. From there it mutated into a highly pathogenic variant, spreading to large parts of the Dutch poultry industry.” The fact that the bird flu virus has been able to spread so quickly worldwide since the 1990s is also due to the enormous in- crease in the scale and density of poultry farms in certain parts of the world, in the professor’s view. “Another reason is that the vaccines that are sometimes used don’t protect against the spread of the virus, much like the coronavirus vaccines in human medicine.”
Risk maps with risk areas The avian influenza variant of most concern is H5N1, a high- ly pathogenic variant. According to Stegeman, the problem is that wild bird populations became increasingly resistant to this virus strain because they are constantly exposed to it. When the H5 virus jumped from poultry to migratory birds in Asia for the first time, it caused significant prob- lems. Stegeman: “However, as it turned out, over time the wild birds didn’t always die immediately after infection, al- lowing for the selection of variants that could persist in these populations. In the breeding areas, in Siberia, for ex- ample, Asian migratory birds come into contact with
6 ▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 1, 2022
PHOTOS: DICK VAN DOORN
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