2023-05-26 00:52:50
Two vaccines tested in France have proven to be “very effective” in protecting Ducks bird flu, reported Thursday ANSES and the Ministry of Agriculture, paving the way for a national vaccination while the virus does not give respite to breeders. After a lull of a month and a halfthe virus has started to flare up again since the beginning of May in the South-West, contaminating more than 70 farms, in particular in the Gers.
The repetition and scale of the crises linked to avian flu (more than 20 million poultry slaughtered in 2021-2022 in France, already more than six million in 2022-23) have convinced European countries to imagine a vaccine strategy.
The French experiment involved thousands of ducks
In France, an experiment was launched last year around two candidate vaccines developed by the Boehringer Ingelheim and Ceva Santé Animale laboratories. They aim to protect mule ducks, bred for foie gras, from the virus. European neighbors are testing vaccines in other poultry species. The French experiment involved several thousand ducks, vaccinated or not. They were euthanized at the end of the process.
The “favorable results provide sufficient guarantees to launch a vaccination campaign from autumn 2023”, wrote the Ministry of Agriculture on its website. The virus circulating in France and around the world was inoculated into a fraction of ducks, previously vaccinated, to measure how much virus they excreted, and if they could still contaminate their congeners.
“It’s very effective”
“Vaccination has made it possible to have very little excretion of the virus in inoculated animals”, whether by the respiratory or digestive route, summarized to AFP Béatrice Grasland, head of the national reference laboratory of ANSES for Ploufragan-Plouzané-Niort avian influenza.
The two vaccines, with “very similar” results, also “almost stopped direct transmission” – when the animals are in close contact – and “abolished” indirect transmission, by air, that is to say potentially from one barn to another.
When the animals were not vaccinated, “an inoculated animal infected another animal every two hours”, explained the researcher. Conversely, those who were vaccinated were “virtually not” contaminated by their neighbor “even in direct contact, in the same park, with the droppings” infected. “It’s very effective,” summarized Ms. Grasland, noting that under these conditions, “normally the epidemic does not start.”
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