WOAH urges animal vaccination to curb deadly diseases

The head of the World Organisation for Animal Health has urged widespread animal vaccination to curb the spread of deadly diseases, according to a report by Reuters.

This comes as Brazil, the world’s top poultry exporter, faces poultry export bans from many countries, as it grapples with an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the country.

“Vaccination is a tool; it’s a very good tool when it exists, but it’s up to each country, region, or group of countries to identify in which case it will be useful to use it or not,” Director General Emmanuelle Soubeyran told Reuters ahead of the start of WOAH’s general assembly on Sunday.

Bird flu has caused the loss of over 633 million birds over the last decade, leading to economic damage and disrupted food supply chains worldwide, the report said.

Bird flu has also spread to mammals, including dairy cows in the United States, raising concerns of a pandemic. The report pointed out the successful duck vaccination effort in France, helping reduce bird flu outbreaks from over 300 to just 10 within a year, which led the United States and Canada to ease their ban on French poultry imports in January, citing good traceability and monitoring.

If properly implemented, vaccination limits virus spread, protects animal health, and lowers the risk of human infection. But it is costly to develop vaccines and roll them out, and vaccination programmes often lead to trade restrictions over fears that a disease may circulate unnoticed, the report said.

Most bird flu vaccination campaigns focus on long-lived birds like ducks or breeders. Broilers—chickens raised for meat—are typically not vaccinated because they do not live long enough, which may limit immediate use in major poultry-exporting nations.

Vaccination has helped eliminate or control other animal diseases, including rinderpest in 2011, the first animal disease ever eradicated globally, and only the second of any kind eradicated after smallpox in humans, WOAH said in its report, as reported by Reuters.