TOM HARTLEY, REPORTER: In a quarantine zone outside Canberra, there’s been a biosecurity scare.
With visitors off limits, and camera in hand, Greg Palethorpe’s giving us a tour of his locked-down egg farm.
GREG PALETHORPE: We have our hot and cold zones where we need to go through decontamination processes on the way in and out.
TOM HARTLEY: Greg’s on edge.
GREG PALETHORPE: Hi girl, how you going?
TOM HARTLEY: The deadly avian flu was detected at a property seven kilometres away.
GREG PALETHORPE: Just come up, the hens are all very quiet at the moment.
TOM HARTLEY: And yesterday, he found one of his hens showing symptoms.
GREG PALETHORPE: Effectively, we euthanised that hen, and we basically put in a bag, in a bin in our controlled area, our hot zone. I rang biosecurity team straight away, and they quickly sent out someone to come pick it up where they do swabs.
But yeah, it certainly, it makes you feel really poor.
TOM HARTLEY: So if the chook’s positive, what does that mean?
GREG PALETHORPE: So we’d have to cull all the hens on site, and then they’d either be buried or burnt here. Which for me, that would be a heartbreaking thing to happen, see all your hens killed.
It’s a trying time when you know there’s potential for such a disease, that can cause such devastation to your hens and your business, is potentially floating around.
TOM HARTLEY: We’re in the grip of a devastating avian flu outbreak, with multiple strains across Australia’s east coast and there’s an urgent fight to keep it contained.
To understand the scale of these outbreaks, and what’s at stake, it’s important to understand the scale of the sector, which is why I’m here to meet industry rep, Dr Jo Sillince.
DR JO SILLINCE, AUSTRALIAN CHICKEN GROWERS’ COUNCIL: Well, for start there are two sectors. There is eggs and there is meat. Australians get through 50kg of chicken meat for every man woman and child per year.
And then in terms of eggs, it’s around, somewhere around 18 million eggs a day, which is a heck of a lot of breakfast eggs.
TOM HARTLEY: And all these farms are more-or-less bunched together?
JO SILLINCE: Yeah, they’re bunched together around a processing plant which is a good thing and a bad thing. It means that they’re separated from each other in terms of groups, but it also means that if there’s a problem with one group, it tends to affect the whole area.
TOM HARTLEY: So how many outbreaks are there at the moment and where are they?
JO SILLINCE: There’s an outbreak in Victoria, near Meredith and it has got a single satellite farm at Terang, so they’re linked. In New South Wales it is north-west Sydney, two farms, and then there’s one egg farm in Canberra.
In terms of outbreak, what’s unprecedented is the response.
TOM HARTLEY: Around the affected farms, control zones, kilometres-wide, restrict the movement of people, poultry and products with state governments running surveillance, trying to isolate the virus before it spreads.
DR ANDREW READ, VETERINARY VIROLOGIST, NSW DP: The highly pathogenic one moves on trucks or by birds moving. It can actually potentially spread on the wind, up to a kilometre or so. For chickens it’s really contagious.
So, we want to be testing basically all the birds, all the chickens in that area to make sure they’re not carrying the virus.
TOM HARTLEY: In virology labs, genetic detectives are equipped with the same tools used to track and trace COVID-19.
Swabs come in twice a day. The high-risk samples are marked red.
ANDREW READ: We’ve tested hundreds of samples, usually it’s a few hundred each day.
TOM HARTLEY: There’s no sign of the H5 strain that’s causing havoc overseas. Instead, these outbreaks are linked to three strains from the H7 family.
ANDREW READ: I think what’s surprising is that they’re all happened at the same time. That’s unusual.
TOM HARTLEY: The H7 strains have been traced to Australia’s wild bird population, namely ducks and responsible for nearly every poultry outbreak in our country since the 1970s.
ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE: They’re being kill at the rate of 7,000 an hour…
ANDREW READ: So there’s a mutation that happens while it’s in the chickens and turns into this high path avian influenza which causes all the disease. So you can have thousands of chickens die overnight, just suddenly, seemingly without any symptoms.
TOM HARTLEY: That’s why, we’re told, Australia’s biosecurity policy is not to manage the virus but to eradicate it.
While cooked poultry products from infected areas are safe to eat, there have been major delays, getting eggs onto shelves.
DANYEL CUCINOTTA, VICTORIAN FARMERS FEDERATION: You’ve got 2 million birds roughly now that have also been culled out of the system, and which is just horrific for those farms unfortunately and also for the supply chain which now means 1.8 million eggs less a day produced in this country.
TOM HARTLEY: Smaller egg farms typically supply smaller shops, and hospitality. Bigger farms supply supermarkets and fast-food chains and usually, the packaging process is shared across farms.
DANYEL CUCINOTTA: What ended up happening was essentially like a standstill, people stopped taking in eggs from other farms and then you saw supply chain issues because eggs weren’t necessarily leaving farms, and then getting packed and then ending up on consumer shelves.
TOM HARTLEY: Some supermarkets are indefinitely limiting egg purchases.
ASSOC. PROF. FLAVIO MACAU, EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY: Limiting purchases is part of the rule book and is very important to avoid things getting out of control.
TOM HARTLEY: If the virus spreads no further, it’s forecast supply chains should normalise by the year’s end.
FLAVIO MACAU: We’ll get to a safer space from a supply perspective, that should help to keep prices, the increase of prices, at bay, and not further contribute to the cost-of-living crisis.
TOM HARTLEY: But the chances of that are literally up in the air with free range farms especially vulnerable.
DANYEL CUCINOTTA: You can be the best farmer in the world, you can have the best biosecurity but at the end of the day, I can’t stop a single migratory bird flying over my farm, and either defecating or mixing in with commercial birds, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
DR BETH COOKSON, AUSTRALIAN CHIEF VETERINARY OFFICER: It does remain a dynamic situation. Emergency responses can be very complex.
TOM HARTLEY: In Australia’s tropical north biosecurity rangers are on the lookout for signs of any virus in wild birds. It is part of a nation-wide surveillance response, that’s ramped up after the federal government committed another $7 million in funding last week.
BETH COOKSON: And whilst it might be encouraging that there hasn’t been any new detections over the last little while, it is still a very dynamic and evolving situation that we’ll continue to manage effectively.
TOM HARTLEY: Australia must go two months without a single case, before it can be officially declared free of avian flu.
An anxious time for farmers like Greg who’s been waiting to find out if there’s a positive case in his flock.
Greg, how are you?
GREG PALETHORPE: Hey Tom, how are you going?
TOM HARTLEY: Did you get the results back?
GREG PALETHORPE: Yeah, the team rang me straight away as soon as they got them, and they were negative. So that means no bird flu, which is a great relief for me.
They did have another case, a backyard case in Canberra. So to me, that sort of says there’s more potential that it has spread to wild bird population and that is obviously, that’s our primary risk and my number one concern.
Even if it’s not and it’s an isolated case, it just extends the biosecurity controls that are in place for a longer period of time.
Every day we get on the farm, you still, what are we going to see?