French duck farmer Herve Dupouy has culled his flock four times since 2015 to stop the spread of bird flu but as a wave of deadly outbreaks nears his farm once again, he says it's time to accept a solution once considered taboo: vaccination.
"The goal is that our animals don't fall ill and that they don't spread the virus," Dupouy said on his farm in Castelneu-Tursan in southwestern France. "Our job as farmers is not to gather dead animals."
Like Dupouy, more and more governments around the world are reconsidering their opposition to vaccines as culling birds or locking them inside has failed to prevent bird flu returning to decimate commercial flocks year after year.
Reuters spoke to senior officials in the world's largest poultry and egg producers, along with vaccine makers and poultry companies. They all said there had been a marked shift in the approach to vaccines globally due to the severity of this year's bird flu outbreak, though the biggest exporter of poultry meat, the United States, told Reuters it remains reluctant.
Besides the cost of culling millions of chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese there is also a growing fear among scientists and governments that if the virus becomes endemic, the chances of it mutating and spreading to humans will only increase.
"That's why every country in the world is worried about bird flu," French agriculture minister Marc Fesneau said.
"There's no reason to panic but we must learn from history on these subjects. This is why we are looking into vaccinations at the global level," he told Reuters.
Most of the world's biggest poultry producers have resisted vaccinations due to concerns they could mask the spread of bird flu and hit exports to countries that have banned vaccinated poultry on fears infected birds could slip through the net.
But since early last year, bird flu, or avian influenza, has ravaged farms around the world, leading to the deaths of more than 200 million birds because of the disease or mass culls, the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) told Reuters.
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