Not less poultry, but fewer poultry farms together and not close to nature reserves. Professor of virology Wim van der Poel is arguing for this now that the bird flu has gripped Dutch poultry farming for a year now.
“The Netherlands is a densely populated country with many animals, which in combination means that there is a continuous threat that a pathogen will jump from animals to humans.” That is what professor of virology at Wageningen University, Wim van der Poel, says.
Untenable situation
According to him, the bird flu is an untenable situation: “We will have to do something about it.” Van der Poel has been researching emerging and zoonotic viruses for more than 20 years. Not only in the Netherlands, but also in a European context, he is committed to preventing animal diseases from eventually developing into a worldwide pandemic.
He advocates a so-called ‘one health approach’. This means that professionals from the world of public and animal health are tackling the problem together.
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Society must change
“Vaccinating animals is not going to solve the bird flu problem overnight. It will help to protect the poultry that is kept, but you will not lose circulation in wild birds just like that. If we really want to do something about this, we have to we are changing society,” says Van der Poel.
According to the professor, this means that companies will be less close to each other, so that the virus can move less easily from one company to another. But also when establishing new poultry farms and setting up nature reserves, careful thought is required. “Is that going to pose a risk in the field of zoonosis: yes or no? That has happened far too little in the past. If we don’t start with that, we will soon have to deal with something else in addition to bird flu.”
More attention to climate change
Of all new infectious diseases in humans, 70 percent have an animal origin. According to virologist Van der Poel, the number of zoonoses has been increasing in recent years, for example, COVID-19 is also a zoonosis. That increase has everything to do with the growing world population, he says: “And you can’t do something about that so easily.”
But, he says, we can think about a number of things better, such as prevention: “Be more aware of problems such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity. These factors also play a role in the development of zoonoses.”
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‘We are reaching the limits’
In the case of bird flu, it is the change of routes that migratory birds take because there is less nature. “We are seeing huge changes in the areas where migratory birds move and where they hibernate.” As a result, the wild birds come into contact with migratory birds that they have never encountered before. “That means that you get different types of outbreaks, such as last summer with the sandwich tern on Texel and in Zeeland, where breeding areas have been completely wiped off the map due to bird flu.”
Will we ever get out of here? “As the Netherlands, we will have to ask ourselves: do we really want all this in this small country? We want to accommodate more people and keep animal production at a high level. You can now see that this is reaching its limits.”
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