This Monday, December 15, the European Commission updated the protection and surveillance zones against highly pathogenic avian influenza (GAAP) due to the appearance of 74 new cases on poultry farms in the Member States.
According to information published this Monday in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), to date, cases of avian influenza have occurred on farms that raise poultry or other birds in captivity in 18 Member States and in Northern Ireland, in the United Kingdom.
Within the European Union (EU), the countries that have so far had farms affected, in addition to Portugal, are Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Slovakia, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and Sweden.
Since the previous update, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia have notified new HPAI outbreaks on poultry farms to the Commission.
Last week, Portugal recorded two more new cases of bird flu in Lisbon and Aveiro, registering, since the beginning of the year, 46 outbreaks of infection by the bird flu virus.
Faced with this situation, the EC updated the delimitations of protection and surveillance zones and restriction zones in these countries, so that these outbreaks do not spread.
In Spain, no new cases were registered and the previously delimited protection and restriction zones were deactivated on December 8th.
HPAI is an infectious viral disease of birds that can have serious consequences on the profitability of poultry farming by disrupting intra-Union trade and exports to third countries.