China’s Great Leap Forward

In an undertaking almost mind-boggling in scope, China has announced that it will vaccinate its entire poultry stock --- all 14 billion of them, roughly 21 percent of the world’s supply.

If that isn’t challenging enough, billions of these birds are raised as free-range livestock and will have to be caught. Indeed, according to Chinese officials, more than three-fourths of poultry in China are raised by families, who let the birds and other domesticated animals wander around the neighborhood, the yard and even through the house in some cases --- likely the biggest reason why the government has decided on such an ambitious undertaking. Close human-to-bird contact, common throughout East and Southeast Asia, is the presumed cause of the handful of human avian flu cases.

Each bird will have to be vaccinated individually. The fact the most birds are raised on small farms or kept in back yards will require veterinary workers to move from village to village, door to door.

Fortunately for the Chinese, cost and availability of the vaccine aren't as problematic: Although no human vaccine is yet available against the potentially deadly H5N1 strain, a bird vaccine has been widely available for several years and costs only 10 cents a dose. Moreover, it’s nearly 100 percent effective against avian flu.

The use of the vaccine on such a wide scale as a precautionary measure represents a major departure from conventional avian flu prevention strategy. Indeed, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations typically recommends such massive vaccinations only in areas where the H5N1 virus has become endemic --- places where it persists and where culling and quarantines have not proven entirely effective.

China is the only Asian country that practices widespread vaccination as a safeguard against avian flu. However, until now, this has been confined only to large-scale producers, not to the millions of peasants with backyard flocks.

Some experts fear such widespread vaccination will make any remaining virus harder to detect.

In Western nations where poultry farming is more developed, the conventional procedure for stopping the disease’s spread is by culling birds within a radius of a few miles of the outbreak, accompanied by a quarantine of birds within a wider area for several weeks.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese officials in Ho Chi Minh City and the capital city of Hanoi have warned farmers to kill or sell all poultry by next Monday --- part of a government-sponsored campaign to rid its two major cities of poultry. Vietnam poultry farmers will be paid $15,000 dong, about half the current market value, if they obey the government edict. However, any birds found alive after the deadline will be destroyed with no compensation.

Officials hope reducing the close human-to-bird contact common in heavily congested cities will, in turn, reduce human expsoure to the deadly H5N1 strain.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at November 15, 2005 04:46 PM | TrackBack