France has slaughtered 16 million birds on farms to try to combat an outbreak of bird flu that has been affecting the country’s poultry sector since late last year. Sources from the Ministry of Agriculture released the numbers on Monday (2) and said there were some signs of containment of the epidemic.
However, with the data updated until Friday (29), there were 1,364 outbreaks in farms and 46 cases in wild animals. The first contamination in this wave of cases was detected on a laying hen farm in the Nord department, near the Belgian border, on November 26.
On December 16, a first outbreak was confirmed in the southwest of the country, on a duck farm in the department of Gers. Bird flu spread in the following weeks in two areas of the New Aquitaine region, one close to the border with Spain, in the departments of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrénées, Landes and Gers; and a second further north, around Dordogne and Lot.
The third major focus, and the most important of all so far, is the Atlantic coast, especially in the departments of Vendée and Loire-Atlantique.
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