Killer bird flu now just a short flight away from NZ
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How close is H5N1 now to reaching New Zealand from Australia?
People in New South Wales are being warned not to panic by poultry products after the state's first positive case of bird flu. Bennett's speech at Hawke's Nest, three hours drive from Sydney, a stunning backdrop for what could be New South Wales' first case of bird flu. It was a giant petrel. These are migratory seabirds that don't typically make land unless of course they are sick.
Bird flu has decimated flocks around the world. More than 140 million farm birds have been culled since January last year. Now strain H5N1 has been detected in Australia just a short flight away from New Zealand.
New Zealand authorities say they are keeping a close eye on what's happening across the Tasman. Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard is urging farmers and bird owners to remain vigilant for any signs of the disease. DOC is about to start vaccinating some of New Zealand's most threatened species against a highly virulent strain of the bird flu that has shown up in Australia.
Hi, I'm Amanda Gillies, and today on The Detail, it's the virus threatening poultry industries around the world. Now, with bird flu on New Zealand's doorstep, are we prepared? And is it just a worry for our native birds and poultry, or for humans too?
H5N1 will kill 90 to 95% of any poultry flock it gets into. Yeah. That's huge. Oh, it's really huge. So it comes in, it is brutal, it'll wipe it out.
That's the end of that flock.
Yeah.
And how quickly does that, once it gets into one, into that flock, how quickly does it spread?
You would start seeing symptoms and deaths within 48 hours. That quickly? Yeah.
Oh, I didn't realise it was that quick.
Oh, it's brutal. Yeah.
How soon do you think it could make that short flight over here? As soon as tomorrow or as long as never? That's Fiona McMillan, the boss of the Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand and Eggs Producers Federation of New Zealand. I'll have more from her in a moment. But first, newsroom senior political reporter Mark Doulder, who has been covering bird flu in detail for years. He says New Zealand is closely watching its spread overseas and labels the current strain lethal.
There are a lot of different kinds of bird flus, kind of like there are different kinds of human flus. We have influenza A and B, and we had H1N1 and so on and so forth. And it's the same in birds. So they're broadly grouped into two umbrellas. There's the low pathogenic avian influenza, which means these are kind of like a cold for birds.
What makes the current H5N1 strain more dangerous to birds than other avian flus?
They're not going to be particularly problematic. And then there's high pathogenic avian influenza. And this H5N1 strain is very much the latter. it can be very devastating to a wide range of animals. H5N1 first popped up in Asia, in Hong Kong, in the 1990s, and it's kind of been bouncing around ever since. But the current strain we're dealing with has been on a global epidemic for about six years, since 2020. Around the same time that COVID was spreading in humans, this was rocketing around in bird populations, spreading across Asia and Europe, and eventually jumping over to America.
I read a stat, I think it's 140 million birds have been culled since January last year alone. The concern is obviously what happens when it arrives here. What is our response? What do we do?
We'll find out through tests. Right now, lots of birds have been reported to dock and are being tested. So the first indication would be a positive test result. The Ministry for Primary Industries has one lab in the country that can test for this. And so that's where all the results are going. It takes a couple of days to actually get them returned. After that, you'd start to see a few different responses activating across a few different ministries. The Ministry for Primary Industries would start working with the poultry industry. on the assumption that this is found in a wild bird, they probably start with farms that are closest to that bird. But potentially quite quickly, we could see a chicken lockdown eventuate in some parts of the country.
DOC would be springing into action, trying to figure out exactly how widespread this outbreak is, and what are the species that are most at risk in that geographic area or areas.
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