By Carien Kruger
Milk SA has made a principled decision to, subject to state approval, test milk on store shelves for any sign of highly contagious avian flu, but the organisation says the decision is not based on any suspicion that signs of the disease will be found.
The H5N1 strain of avian flu was first confirmed in a milk herd in the United States in March last year, and this country’s agriculture department confirmed 1 005 cases in 17 federal states on 9 April this year.
Dr. Mark Chimes, Milk SA’s programme manager for animal health and welfare, says that avian flu has not been found in dairy cows in any other country, and no symptoms of the disease have been reported in South African cows.
Milk SA’s Dairy Research and Development Committee has decided in principle to survey to draw up a baseline and be ready for any possible future events.
Chimes says the committee is now preparing a protocol for the survey, which will be submitted for approval to Dr Mpho Maya, director of animal health in the Department of Agriculture, because avian flu is a controlled disease.
“Our approach is to conduct a survey to determine the prevalence or absence of highly contagious avian flu in retail milk. Samples from various brands will be tested.”
The U.S. government confirmed with their tests that pasteurised milk was completely safe, but asked people not to use unpasteurised milk. There have been cases where cats that drank milk in milking sheds died from avian flu.
Chimes says the Milk SA Committee decided to test pasteurised milk on store shelves, and not unpasteurised milk on farms, because it provides safe, uninfected samples. In contrast, PKR tests, which are highly sensitive, will still be able to detect dead remnants of the virus’s RNA.
In addition, milk from different areas is mixed and packaged in milk factories, thus providing an opportunity for a broad survey.
The H5N1 strain was recently detected in wild birds on Marion Island, southeast of South Africa, and the poultry industry is very concerned about possible outbreaks among chickens in the coming winter.
‘SA must prepare urgently’
The H5N1 strain was also recently confirmed in Britain for the first time in the milk of a single sheep in Yorkshire. It was part of the routine testing of animals kept with bird flu-infected birds. No other sheep in the herd tested positive.
This incident and the high incidence of avian flu in America this past winter caused Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of Agbiz, to write on X that it was essential for South Africa to prepare for future outbreaks.
Previous outbreaks in South Africa have shown that the impact extends far beyond farms and, among other things, affects jobs and causes higher food prices.
The South African Poultry Association (SAPA) has previously said that foreign vaccines for the H5N1 strain of the virus have already been registered. Still, a locally produced vaccine for the H6N7 strain, which caused catastrophic losses in the north of the country in 2023, is yet to go through the entire regulatory approval process.
The industry would like to start with vaccination, but the Department of Agriculture’s protocol is so cumbersome and expensive that no farm has vaccinated yet.
Egg Prices Sky High in America
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the H5 virus has been found in 336 commercial poultry flocks and 207 backyard flocks since April 2024, and more than 90.9 million birds have been affected. The current outbreak began in January 2022.
The Associated Press reported on April 10 that the average egg price in the United States reached a new record high of $6.23/dozen (about R120) in March, despite the approximately 4 million dozen eggs imported in February.
None of the 2.1 million birds killed by avian flu in America in March were on commercial egg farms. Egg prices began to decline in the second half of last month, but probably not enough to affect the average price yet, and at the same time, stores may not have implemented the declines immediately, according to the report.
Also read:
Bird flu could become next human pandemic
Protocol for vaccination against bird flu still unworkable
Avian influenza checkmate: ‘We can’t compensate,’ says state
