In overseas avian flu outbreaks, egg layers are most affected.
In overseas avian flu outbreaks, egg layers are most affected.
No meat chickens are involved in New Zealand’s first outbreak of a highly pathogenic bird flu that biosecurity officials are trying to eradicate in Otago and overseas experience suggests chicken consumption won’t take a hit.
Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand executive director Michael Brooks said in outbreaksin the UK and Australia changes to chicken meat consumption were “almost immeasurable”.
Consumers were familiar with the need to cook chicken and eggs properly, which rendered the products completely safe, he said.
The North Otago farm at the centre of the scare where 80,000 chickens are being euthanised is an egg producer and no eggs have come off the property since biosecurity officials stepped in, he said.
New Zealand has imposed an export ban on all poultry goods since the H7N6 strain was identified and the farm locked down at the weekend.
The export industry for processed meat, day-old chicks and fertile eggs was relatively small, earning around $180 million a year, Brooks said.
The number of chickens needing to be culled has doubled as bird flu spreads to a second shed on the Otago farm. Photo / Ben Tomsett
Two big meat chicken and chick breeding exporters operate in New Zealand. One was a French operation in New Plymouth, the other is US company Cobb, which set up in Huntly, Waikato several years ago partly because of New Zealand’s avian flu-free status, he said.
New Zealand companies also exported eggs, chickens and chicken meat to the Pacific Islands.
In overseas outbreaks, farms specialising in egg-laying chickens and free-range layers seemed to be most affected, Brooks said.
The strain involved in the Otago outbreak is not the ominous H5N1 strain poultry industries have been particularly worried about after it spread through South America last year and crossed to the Antarctic.
But the outbreak has blotted New Zealand’s reputation as the only country in the world free of bird influenza.
The aim is to eradicate it completely and return to that unique status, Brooks said.
The main difference between the worrying H5N1 strain and the Otago farm strain is that the former is spread by wild birds, whereas the latter strain is more likely to be spread farm-by-farm, he said.
The Otago farm strain was formerly a low pathogenic strain found in waterfowl like ducks. It didn’t make them sick but they carried it, Brooks said.
If carriers mixed with chickens it seemed the pathogen mutated to become highly pathogenic, which is what had happened in Otago.
“The crazy thing from our perspective is that for 30 years that has happened regularly in Australia, but never happened here – until now.”
The reason the feared H5N1 strain, which is not in New Zealand, was so problematic is that it had transmitted to wild birds and become endemic. For 20-plus years the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) had done surveillance on birds coming from the Northern Hemisphere and never found avian influenza, Brooks said.
“We always thought the threat would come from the Northern Hemisphere, but suddenly the H1N1 strain was in Antarctica.
“The concern was it could spread from the Argentine peninsula to the Ross Sea and affect birds or animals, and get to our sub-Antarctic islands and New Zealand. If it’s in wild birds it’s hard to do biosecurity on, particularly for a free-range farmer.”
The New Zealand poultry industry and MPI had been working intensively to prepare for the more serious H1NI strain for some time.
Brooks said there were around 140 commercial chicken farmers in New Zealand but around 15 large industry players were responsible for more than 80 per cent of the eggs and other production.
Meat chicken processors needed their supplying farms to be at most two hours away from plants, he said.
The two biggest industry players were Ingham and Tegel. Inghams operated at Waitoa, Waikato, and Tegel had operations in West Auckland, New Plymouth and Christchurch.
New Zealand does not allow importing of raw chicken meat and eggs.
Andrea Fox joined theHerald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the $26 billion dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.
