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New bird flu viruses in ducks after vaccines largely prevented H7N9 in chickens
In response to bird flu pandemics starting in 2013, officials in China introduced a new vaccine for chickens in September 2017. Recent findings suggest that the vaccine largely worked but detected two new genetic variations of the H7N9 and H7N2 subtypes in unvaccinated ducks.
[...] "It surprised me that the novel, highly pathogenic subtypes had been generated in and adapted so well to ducks, because the original highly pathogenic form of H7N9 has very limited capacity to replicate in ducks," says Hualan Chen, a senior author on the paper and an animal virologist at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.
Chen's team collected over 37,928 chickens and 15,956 duck genetic samples 8 months before and 5 months after the vaccine's introduction. They isolated 304 H7N9 viruses before the vaccine's release, and only 17 H7N9 viruses and one H7N2 virus after.
"Our data show that vaccination of chickens successfully prevented the spread of the H7N9 virus in China," says Chen. "The fact that human infection has not been detected since February 2018 indicates that consumers of poultry have also been well-protected from H7N9 infection."
Cell Host & Microbe, Chen et al.: "Rapid Evolution of H7N9 Highly Pathogenic Viruses that Emerged in China in 2017" https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(18)30434-7, DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2018.08.006
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Friday September 28 2018, @01:26AM
It looks to me like chicken farmers are just sharecroppers, taken advantage of by the big guys.
This is an interesting read. [theguardian.com]
No wonder the farmers in the Carolinas left their chickens to drown. They probably can't afford to do anything else, and if their insurance is not adequate there might be a rash of bankruptcies there.