Poultry industry needs to change dramatically to stop bird flu in the Netherlands, says virology professor

No less poultry, but fewer poultry farms together and not close to nature reserves. Virology professor Wim van der Poel argues this now that bird flu has gripped Dutch poultry farming for a year now.

“The Netherlands is a densely populated country with many animals, which in combination means there is a continuing threat that a pathogen will jump from animals to humans.” This is what the professor of virology at the University of Wageningen, Wim van der Poel, says.

Unsustainable situation

According to him, bird flu is an unsustainable situation: “We will have to do something about it.” Van der Poel has been researching emerging and zoonotic viruses for over 20 years. Not only in the Netherlands, but also in a European context, he is committed to preventing animal diseases from turning into a global pandemic.

It advocates a so-called “one-size-fits-all approach to health”. This means that public health and animal health professionals are tackling the problem together.

Society must change

“Vaccinating animals won’t solve the avian flu problem overnight. It will help protect farmed poultry, but you won’t lose circulation in wild birds just like that. If we really want to do something about it, we are changing society.” , says Van der Poel.

According to the professor, this means that companies will become less close to each other, so that the virus can move less easily from one company to another. But even when establishing new poultry farms and establishing nature reserves, careful consideration is required. “This will pose a risk in the field of zoonosis: yes or no? Too little has happened in the past. If we don’t start with that, we will soon have to deal with something else besides avian flu.”

More attention to climate change

Of all the new infectious diseases in humans, 70 percent have an animal origin. According to virologist Van der Poel, the number of zoonoses has increased in recent years, for example COVID-19 is also a zoonosis. That increase has everything to do with the growing world population, he says, “And you can’t do something about it that easily.”

But, he says, we can think better of a number of things, such as prevention: “Be more aware of problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. These factors also play a role in the development of zoonoses.”

‘We are reaching the limits’

In the case of avian flu, it is the change of course that migratory birds take because there is less nature. “We are seeing huge changes in the areas where migratory birds move and where they hibernate.” As a result, wild birds come into contact with migratory birds they have never encountered before. “This means there are several types of outbreaks, such as last summer with the sandwich tern on Texel and Zeeland, where breeding areas have been completely wiped off the map due to bird flu.”

Will we ever get out of here? “As the Netherlands, we will have to ask ourselves: do we really want all of this in this small country? We want to accommodate more people and keep animal production at a high level. Now you can see that this is reaching its limits.”