MUMBAI: Asian chicken farmers are resisting the worst bird flour revolution in the region in years, with the deadly virus affecting farms stretching from Japan to India, rolling in some of the chicken prices and with no signs of a discount.
More than 20 million chickens have been destroyed in South Korea and Japan since November. The highly pathogenic H5N8 virus arrived last week in India, the world’s No. 6 producer, and has already been reported in 10 states.
Although bird flu is common in Asia at this time of year due to migratory bird patterns, new strains of the virus have become more deadly in wild birds, making countries on flight routes particularly vulnerable. injured, say experts.
“This is one of the worst incidents ever in India,” said Mohinder Oberoi, an Indian animal health expert and former adviser to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the DA (FAO).
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“There are a lot of diseases in crows and ducks. People are scared of the disease in crows. They know they fly for a long time and think they can catch their chickens or even humans.”
The Asian revolution comes as Europe suffers the worst bird flu revolution in years, and continues on the heels of COVID-19, which will hurt sales early chickens in some places amid concerns about fake diseases but are now rising in demand due to more home cooking.
Poultry prices in India fell by almost a third last week as cautious buyers, increasingly concerned about infection from the pandemic, kept the meat clean.
Avian flu cannot be transmitted through chicken pox, and the H5N8 virus is never known to have caught humans, but consumers still fear, said Uddhav Ahire, chairman of Anand Agro Group, a chicken company based in the western city of Nashik.
Live chicken prices are already as low as 58 Indian rupees (US $ 0.79) per kilogram, below cost of production, he said.
In South Korea and Japan, no impact on the market has yet been seen, officials said, with stronger demand for chicken meat for home-cooked food at lockout impact on prices.
VIRUS INFORMATION
The rapid and widespread spread of the latest upheavals means that this is one of the worst waves in Asia since the early 2000s.
In Japan, where Chiba erupted near Tokyo to more than 1,000km away in Miyazaki on the island of Kyushu in just two months, new cases are still happening.
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“We cannot say that the risk of the spread of flu has diminished as the wild bird migration season continues into March, or even in April in some cases,” said an animal health official at the ministry of agriculture. .
The H5N8 viruses found in Japan and Korea are very similar to those spread through Europe in 2019, which evolved from viruses that were common in 2014, said Filip Claes, head of the Emergency Center FAO for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD).
A variety that is circulating in Europe since the end of 2020 is also causing great damage.
The new rays are causing more damage now that they are more deadly in wild birds, said Holly Shelton, a flu expert at the British Pirbright Institute.
“It is very clear that this virus has established itself in wild bird populations so it is now more likely to spread into poultry farms,” she said.
Mandatory flu vaccination for chickens in China has protected the region’s top producer, even though the virus has killed wild swans there.
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Indonesia, the No. 2 producer in Asia, is only a temporary turning point for wild birds, reducing the risk of infection, said Fadjar Sumping Tjatur Rassa, director of animal health at the Ministry of Agriculture.
However, the country has banned the import of live birds from countries with H5N8 and has established a surveillance system for early detection of the virus, he said.
Without major bird flight routes across Southeast Asia, countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have so far erupted H5N8, but there are risks from the movement of people and goods.
“It will continue to spread until another virus comes in to replace it,” Shelton said.