“very effective” vaccines on ducks

Good news for breeders. Two vaccines tested in France have proven “very effective” to protect ducks from avian flu, reported Thursday, May 25, ANSES and the Ministry of Agriculture. This announcement opens the way to a national vaccination while the virus does not give respite to breeders.

After a lull of a month and a half, the virus has started to flare up again since the beginning of May in the South-West, contaminating more than 70 farms, in particular in the Gers. Each time, infected animals (mainly waterfowl) are slaughtered, preventive slaughter of nearby healthy animals is decided, and poultry production is permanently disrupted.

A vaccination campaign in the fall of 2023

The repetition and scale of the crises linked to avian flu (more than 20 million poultry slaughtered in 2021-2022 in France, already more than six million in 2022-23) have convinced European countries to imagine a vaccine strategy. In France, an experiment was launched last year around two candidate vaccines developed by the Boehringer Ingelheim and Ceva Santé Animale laboratories.

They aim to protect mule ducks, bred for foie gras, from the virus. European neighbors are testing vaccines in other poultry species. The French experiment involved several thousand ducks, vaccinated or not. They were euthanized at the end of the process. THE “favorable results provide sufficient guarantees to launch a vaccination campaign from autumn 2023”wrote the Ministry of Agriculture on its website.