From the New York Times: China’s plans to vaccinate billions of chickens against avian flu could backfire and end up spreading the disease, poultry and vaccine experts warned last week.
Vaccination teams can easily carry the virus from farm to farm on their shoes, clothes and equipment unless they change or sterilize them each time, the experts said. That could be particularly difficult in a country like China, where the veterinary care system is underfinanced and millions of birds are kept in small flocks by families.
Also, experts said the task is likely to be overwhelming, because the Chinese eat about 14 billion chickens a year, so mass vaccinations would have to be repeated again and again, while the risk of the disease being reintroduced by migratory birds, in which it is now endemic, would be constant.
Bird vaccination campaigns involve a huge amount of labor because the animals must be injected one by one. China’s Agriculture Ministry said last Tuesday [Nov. 15] that it would inject all of the nation’s 5.2 billion chickens, geese and ducks with a vaccine.
In making its announcement on Tuesday, the Chinese government did not detail how it planned to vaccinate billions of birds safely.
How to Vaccinate 14 Billion Birds
Fourteen billion. That’s how many ducks and chickens are produced in China every year. To vaccinate all those birds against avian flu, as the government announced last week that it was planning to do, would require about 550 million injections a week.
Sound daunting? Here’s another number: 1.3 billion. With one-fifth of the world’s population, China has no shortage of people to accomplish the task.
G. Donald Ritter, director of health services for Mountaire Farms, a large poultry producer based in Selbyville, Del., said that, if any country could inoculate all its poultry, China was it. “It’s labor intensive,” he said of the process. “But they’ve got more people and labor than anybody.”
China has had more than 60 outbreaks of avian influenza among poultry in the last 2 years. While a widespread vaccination program can help control outbreaks, the usual procedure in most countries is “cull and quarantine,” killing all birds within a few miles of the affected area and quarantining all others in a larger area.
