Over the past week, South Africa’s veterinary body has officially registered two more outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in poultry.
According to these latest notifications to the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), one of the outbreaks affected a farm with commercial ostriches. Ten of the 3,382 birds at the farm in Western Cape tested positive for a virus of the H5 virus family in early October.
This brought the number of outbreaks in this series to 23 since April of this year. Directly impacted have been more than 1.785 million farmed poultry and other birds in South Africa.
The following month, an HPAI virus of the H7N6 serotype was detected in South Africa’s domestic birds for the first time.
Up to the end of November, poultry have tested positive for this virus variant at 109 commercial premises. These confirmed outbreaks have involved more than 10.4 million poultry, based on information supplied to WOAH. This includes 66,000 birds at a farm in Mogale city in Gauteng province, in an outbreak that began on November 24.
Losses of poultry due to HPAI have been among the leading causes of a recent decline in output by the South African poultry industry, and is one of the drivers for the increase in chicken meat imports from Brazil. Earlier this month, however, the South African Poultry Association reported signs of recovery in the sector as the number of new cases in the country began to ease.
View our continuing coverage of the global avian influenza situation.
