Vern Evans
The mass vaccination of poultry in the United States is a possibility, but health officials admit that some challenges remain. A nationwide vaccine strategy to inject all poultry will present some issues that will be difficult to resolve.
Just creating enough injections to get them into every bird hatched in the U.S. will be an uphill battle to begin with. The idea behind the mass vaccination strategy is to “protect the supply chain.”
“So, when we think about these vaccines, more than 30 countries have now implemented some sort of a vaccine strategy since 2005,” said American Farm Bureau Federation Economist Bernt Nelson. “Historically, when countries have done this, this has caused some major trade issues. Importing countries have a concern. They don’t want to risk an imported bird spreading the virus into the local flocks or wildlife.”
According to the Texas Farm Bureau, vaccines pose a logistical challenge. “One of the biggest limiting factors of implementing a vaccine strategy to poultry is that the only vaccines available have to be injected at least two to three times, and with our egg laying flock sitting at about 375 million birds, that’s just not feasible with the labor that’s needed,” Nelson said.
But Nelson also commented that the infections are slowing down anyway, so the possibility of needing a mass vaccination program could be waning. “Kind of looking at a slowdown this time of the year, when we think about what’s happening with our migratory birds, the migrations have slowed down. We’re in nesting season, so there’s a lot less bird movement, and thus we have a lot lower case load of avian influenza,” Nelson said. “That’s about normal for this time of the year. We have had one major detection in the past, you know, week or two, and that was 700,000 egg layers in South Dakota.”
The good news is that the rulers and health officials admit that bird flu is waning. However, they also admit that a mass vaccination plan is possible. So, what will our future look like regarding the bird flu?
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