The Government is mulling over a plan to vaccinate the country’s poultry flock against bird flu as it scrambles to curb the spread of the worst-ever outbreak. The current global bird flu outbreak is the most severe ever seen and experts are reportedly reviewing the risk of the virus’ transmission to people every week.
While the virus has not yet mutated to enable human-to-human transmission, it has been found in otters and foxes across the UK. This raised concerns that another mutation or two could threaten to trigger the next pandemic.
At present, there is a ban on vaccinating birds against the H5N1 strain of bird flu. But with tens of millions of birds at risk and more than 200 million already dying, the Government may be forced to enact a major change of policy.
While cases in the UK are being looked at, Professor Ian Brown, scientific services director at the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), has warned that the global spread is particularly concerning.
He noted that the recent incidents of mass deaths in seals in the Caspian Sea and sea lions in Peru could signal mammal-to-mammal transmission. This would put the word in “new territory” and bring the prospect of a new pandemic closer.
While the virus has been found in UK mammals, evidence suggests they were cases of bird-to-mammal transmission. There have been more than 200 cases recorded in mammals, including grizzly bears, mink, dolphins and seals.
But bird flu has in fact been “jumping from birds from all sorts of different mammals, including whales even”, Dr Justine Butler, head of research at Viva!, previously told Express.co.uk.
But what was more concerning was an investigation into a bird flu outbreak at a Spanish mink farm, which found evidence of mink-to-mink transmission.
Dr Butler said: “They think the virus may have mutated to make it more easily transmissible between mammals. That is a concern. Once it spreads between one group of mammals, there is a possibility that it will be transmitted to humans and that could herald the next pandemic, which is really concerning.
“Just like Covid is easily spread in the air and there are different variants with some more transmissible than others. It is exactly the same with bird flu.” While this was a Spanish incident, officials in the UK are keeping a close eye on the situation.
It has set up a new technical group of experts and senior officials from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), APHA, and academia that carries out “weekly reviews” of bird flu’s risk to humans.
The group has said the current threat is at Level 3 – which means there are changes in the virus genome that result in mammal-to-mammal transmission. If there was evidence of mammal-to-mammal transmission, the risk would be upped to Level 4.
Prof Brown told the i paper that if this happened, “then we have got to be concerned, no question” for the potential human transmission, which result in a Level 5 threat level.
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The expert said: “At the moment, the UK is actively reviewing all of its plans for mitigation and prevention of avian influenza. Vaccination [of poultry] is one of them. There is a cross-sector group looking at that.
“Let’s just say there’s a recognition that everyone’s got to work at pace, and nobody’s sitting on their hands. That represents quite a big change, because vaccination is prohibited in the UK in poultry, so it has to be carefully balanced, but obviously with the changing risk, looking at vaccination as one component of a control programme is obviously prudent.”
But he added that this would not be a “simple fix” as it would be expensive and require biosecurity measures to remain in place. Scientists are also slightly wary of vaccinating poultry as it can still let the virus to transmit within flocks of healthy birds.
Prof Brown continued: “Some sectors in Europe have been really, really badly hit. The French foie gras industry – the ducks have been massively hit over successive years, to the point where probably it’s been brought to its knees. So there’s been a lot of interest from some sectors saying we need to be able to try and protect our birds better.”
“There would be a cost. It wouldn’t be a fix that means you could ignore your biosecurity, you vaccinate your birds and everything’s fine,” he added.
The UKHSA/APHA technical group is now understood to be looking at a potential candidate vaccines for humans if the virus does jump to people.
This comes after it was revealed earlier this week that the UKHSA is considering rolling out lateral flow tests to detect bird flu in humans in the event of a spillover to people.
In Britain, there have been over 330 outbreaks of bird flu across the country’s poultry farms since October 2021, resulting in the culling of millions of birds in a “totally unprecedented” outbreak.
The World Health Organisation has said that the world “must prepare” for bird flu, which could soon stop posing a low risk to humans.
It has urged countries to ramp up surveillance of areas where humans and animals interact. It also working to ensure that supplies of vaccines and antivirals are made available if the situation worsens.
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