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Bird flu has broken out at a laying hen farm in Bad Bentheim, just across the border in Germany. It is a different variant than we have seen in the Netherlands in recent years: the H7 variant. To prevent the highly contagious disease from reaching other farms, a transport ban applies in a ten-kilometer circle around the affected farm. Nieuwsuur and NOS radio 1 interviewed Arjan Stegeman about the outbreak.

Stegeman calls the outbreak worrisome because it involves a variant that is very deadly for poultry. Chickens and turkeys die irrevocably if they become infected. This is a new variant that probably got into a barn as a mild virus and mutated there into a highly pathogenic variant.

According to Stegeman, research needs to be done quickly to determine if and how far the virus has already spread. One favorable difference of the H7 variant compared to the H5 variant that has been circulating in recent years is that it has not been proven to be able to spread through wild birds.