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A Brutal Wave of Bird Flu Spotlights the Need for a Poultry Vaccine
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Maryn McKenna

Science
Apr 18, 2022 7:00 AM


A BRUTAL WAVE OF BIRD FLU SPOTLIGHTS THE NEED FOR A POULTRY VACCINE

More than 27 million birds have died or been slaughtered, and wild birds are
dying too. Without a shot, farmers have to rely on vigilance and culling their
flocks.
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Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

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These days, when someone comes to do chores at the Moline Brothers turkey farm
in northwest Iowa, they park in a designated lot at the edge of the property.
They enter a small building with a single purpose: to cache everything that they
brought onto the farm from the outside world. They change into clothes and boots
that are reserved for them, exit the far side, get into a farm-owned truck, and
drive to the barn where they’ll be working. At the barn, they pull on coveralls,
swap boots again, and swish their feet through a tub of disinfectant before they
enter the long, sunny building full of cheeping baby poults.

It’s a burden, more than the Molines—Brad, Grant, and their father, John—have
ever asked of their employees before. So is telling the guy who drives the
single feed truck they allow on the property not to get out of his truck’s cab,
and unhooking the bin lids and guiding the long delivery tube themselves. And so
is going down the road to another address to fetch UPS and FedEx packages that
normally might come to their door. Deliveries aren’t allowed on the farm any
more.

Each of those maneuvers shares a single objective: keeping avian influenza away
from their birds. The Molines have intimate experience with the virus. When bird
flu tore through the Midwest in 2015, creating the largest animal-disease
disaster in US history, they lost hundreds of turkeys to the disease overnight
and were required to have their entire flock of 56,000 slaughtered. Afterward,
they built new barns, imposed new work rules, and tuned up their farm’s
defenses. Now, with the pathogen advancing across the US in amounts not seen
since 2015, the Molines are strengthening their biosecurity to the highest
levels they can manage as independent farmers, and hoping to stave off another
disaster.



“Everyone has worked with us really well, because they all went through 2015
too,” Brad Moline said Friday morning, raising his voice over the musical
gargling of 4-week-old turkeys burbling around his ankles. “We’re all in this
together. No one wants to see that happen again.”

It’s hard to take stock of this, being still in the midst of Covid, but the US
is in the grip of a ferocious epidemic—a panzootic, in technical terms—caused by
highly pathogenic avian flu. So far, there has been no threat to human health,
though bird flu strains have jumped species to sicken humans before. But the
harm to farmers and the food supply is already profound; as of Friday, more than
27 million birds, including almost 5 percent of all egg-laying hens in the
country, had died or been killed to slow down its spread.



The onslaught is forcing reevaluation of the possibility of vaccinating US
poultry against the disease, a step that parts of the poultry industry and also
federal policymakers have rejected for years. But while vaccines are used in
other nations, there are none in routine use in the US that could stop this
wave—and even if one were used, it could not stop a parallel wave of the same
flu that is ripping through wild bird species in an unprecedented way.

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As of last week, the fast-moving pathogen had been found in poultry and adjacent
species 182 times in 27 states, according to the Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture. It has invaded every
type of bird-growing operation—turkeys, broilers, egg-laying farms, and breeders
that produce eggs for hatching—as well as backyard flocks, pet chickens, and
game birds bred to be released for shooting.



Simultaneously, the flu has been found 665 times in 32 states in wild birds,
both among birds that are hunted, such as mallards and widgeons, and in
charismatic predators, such as snowy owls and bald eagles, in which it is almost
100 percent fatal. Last week, in a post that sent ripples of sadness across
social media, the University of Minnesota’s Raptor Center announced it had to
humanely euthanize a sick family of great horned owls—a mated pair and three
fuzzy babies—that were nesting in a downtown park.



It is an extraordinary wave of illness given that highly pathogenic avian flu
was only identified in the US in January, in three ducks shot by hunters in
North and South Carolina; the virus was detected after the ducks were checked by
wildlife biologists doing routine surveillance. But it parallels its extreme
spread in Europe and the Middle East last winter and this year. There were vast
die-offs of cranes in Israel, ducks in France, and geese in the United Kingdom,
along with millions of poultry in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and
Germany. In Canada, only one province, Manitoba, remains free of avian flu.

The interplay between the disease in wild birds and in commercially raised ones
is complex. In 2015, farm birds sometimes became infected by viruses that crept
in from other farms, either on contaminated shoes and tires, or through plumes
of pathogens drifting on the wind. This year, every farm infection appears to
have come from wild-bird contact, says Yuko Sato, a poultry veterinarian and
assistant professor at the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine.
“The industry has refined how it responds since 2015,” she says. “If we have
somewhere that tests positive, the priority is to put down those birds as soon
as possible, because the longer they stay on the site alive, the viral load is
just going to keep ramping up. So farm workers are getting better at noticing
when something in their flock is off.”

A subtlety of so many types of farms experiencing outbreaks is that each type of
bird—breeders, broilers, turkeys, layers—is raised in a different type of
housing, which means there cannot be a single design flaw among all of these
facilities that has allowed the virus access. The vulnerability may be more
simple: their location. Farms are in the countryside, under the flyover paths of
wild birds—and near roosting sites, if there are ponds or attractive food
nearby. Bird poop containing the virus could wind up in the grass on a farm, or
on rodents that have moved through the grass, or on stubble that blows off
nearby fields, or in smaller birds, such as swallows, that have contact with
migrating birds. Or it could be in all of these, which means even a small lapse
in farm safety procedures could let the virus in.

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The 360-degree nature of the threat could lead the US poultry industry to accept
vaccination for the first time. Before, vaccination has always been ruled out
because it prevents disease, but not infection, meaning that vaccinated birds
could spread the virus undetected. (If this sounds like questions that were
raised over Covid vaccines: Yes, it’s the same problem.) That possibility seemed
not worth the risk to US producers, especially because other countries that are
free of bird flu might turn away US chicken as a disease-importation risk. With
bird flu so widespread now, that attitude may be changing. The US Department of
Agriculture is supporting research projects to develop vaccines for the
particular strains of flu that are most destructive in chickens. One, based at
the University of Minnesota, recently escalated its testing from lab work to
mice.

A vaccine that works immunologically would still face practical hurdles, such as
the cost to farmers, the difficulty of administration, and working out dosing
and timing. It would also need to be tuned to the particular strains affecting
birds; just as for humans, there is no universal flu vaccine. Farmers and the
industry would have to decide whether there are subsets of the vast US poultry
flock that would most benefit from vaccination. Those might be birds in the near
vicinity of an outbreak; or species whose production cycle lets them live
longer, such as turkeys compared to broilers; or birds of particular economic
value, such as breeder hens that are repositories of proprietary genetics. Or
all of them. It is not something that could be put in place quickly.

“Before 2015, we had not considered this, and so we hadn’t developed ways to do
it. And now we are playing catch-up,” says Carol Cardona, a wildlife
veterinarian and chair of avian health at the University of Minnesota College of
Veterinary Medicine. “You can see how long it took to put Covid vaccination in
place, and that was for one species, humans. And we had all the technology in
place already. We don't have the technology in place to do this right now.”

There’s a further complication to rolling out a poultry flu shot in the US.
While some vaccine formulas have long-standing approval here, they have not been
used in decades. In the enormous 2015 outbreak, the USDA evaluated them against
the avian flu strain rolling across the country and decided none of the formulas
were effective enough, or a close enough genetic match, to justify the cost of
ramping up production and the time to get any vaccine out to the field. Some
other countries routinely vaccinate poultry, but those initiatives have not all
been success stories. In Egypt, for instance, birds developed diminished immune
responses to the vaccine. Instead of chasing the virus from the Egyptian flock,
that allowed the disease to become endemic there—making it not an episodic
threat but a permanent one, to humans as well as to poultry.

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Turning avian flu into an endemic disease could create a permanent threat to
wild birds also. Wildlife biologists uneasily acknowledge that something is
different this year. Flu’s point of intersection between the wild world and
domesticated birds was always thought to be among ducks and other waterfowl,
which can carry the virus without being sickened by it. If other wild species
fell ill—a raptor after eating a duck, for instance—those cases were considered
rare. But this flu is already hitting wild birds hard. “We've had thousands of
birds die in Florida; we have ongoing outbreaks in black vultures,” says David
Stallknecht, a wildlife epidemiologist and director of the Southeastern
Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, a research institute housed at the
University of Georgia. “We've had 20 positive eagles from Florida, South
Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina alone. Snow geese in the Midwest, they
probably have thousands dying.”

Since wild birds cannot be inoculated, the only hope is that viruses spreading
among them burn themselves out. And since there is no vaccine yet, farmers such
as Brad Moline must remain on guard. Early last week, tornado-force winds
damaged farms not far from him and sent dust swirling across the landscape, from
the direction of lagoons where snow geese had roosted earlier this spring. He
was contemplating layering landscape cloth over his barns’ ventilation outlets
to keep out possible contamination, just to be sure.



Vaccinating every bird on the farm against every flu outbreak might not be
necessary, he said. But he could envision vaccinating birds that are growing
during the spring migration season. His turkeys already get a half-dozen
vaccines to protect them against other diseases, and this would be no different.
“I’m a huge advocate of vaccines,” he says. “I think we would have to seriously
look at this, the way this thing's blowing up worldwide.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Maryn McKenna is a senior writer at WIRED covering health, public health and
medicine, including the Covid pandemic, and a faculty member at Emory
University’s Center for the Study of Human Health. Before coming to WIRED she
freelanced for magazines in the US and Europe including Scientific American,
Smithsonian, The... Read more
Senior Writer
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TopicsinfluenzabirdsagricultureUSDAinfectious
diseasehealthdiseasespandemicsepidemiology



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