Asia has spent 30 years fighting bird flu. Here's what Australia can learn

What can Australia learn from Asia's battle with H5N1 variant bird flu? Fri 26 Jun 2026 at 5:11am The first countries in the world to deal with the H5N1 variant bird flu have lessons for Australia after cases were detected in the country's south. Asian nations have nearly 30 years of experience stamping out the disease, responding to outbreaks with culling, surveillance and restrictions on moving poultry. Others in the region have also vaccinated chickens and ducks. "For Australia, Asia's lesson is not that one country found a perfect formula," said Vinod Balasubramaniam, associate professor in molecular virology at Monash University Malaysia. "The lesson is that fragmented responses fail." Asia's experience showed that H5 bird flu was not controlled by one single dramatic measure, he said. "The most successful responses in Asia recognised that H5 is not simply a poultry disease," Dr Balasubramaniam said. "It is a disease of interfaces between wild birds and domestic birds, farms and markets, animal health and public health, ecological systems and trade." At this stage, Australia has detected H5 in a small number of wild seabirds in Western Australia and South Australia, not in poultry. How have some of Asia's worst-affected countries responded to H5N1 and which measures might be most useful if the variant spreads in Australia? Mass culling When H5N1 avian flu first infected people there in 1997, Hong Kong killed 1.5 million chickens in three days to eradicate the disease. It was a measure that other countries repeated as bird flu spread through the region in the 2000s, reaching South Korea, Japan and South-East Asia. "While it results in large numbers of animals being sacrificed, culling is the only tried and true method for containing H5N1 once it gets into farms," said Andrew Pekosz, a professor and researcher in respiratory viruses at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. South Korea killed millions of chickens and other poultry during outbreaks of H5 avian flu in the 2010s, while Japan slaughtered more than 300,000 chickens and ducks at two sites in 2016 after detecting bird flu. In Thailand, the most important measure had been rapid mass culling of poultry at affected farms along with appropriate compensation for farmers, said Prasert Auewarakul, a professor and researcher in avian flu at Mahidol University in Bangkok. "The culling limited the viral spread and cut the transmission chain,"he said. But culling had limited success in some countries, including Vietnam, when authorities offered too little compensation. Dr Balasubramaniam warned culling was an effective but "socially fragile" measure. "If compensation is delayed, inadequate or poorly trusted, farmers may hesitate to report disease. That creates silent transmission," he said. "In outbreak control, delayed reporting is often more dangerous than the [first reported] case itself." Surveillance Countries quick to detect H5 or other bird flu cases had prevented the virus from becoming established, said Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for the World Health Organization in the Western Pacific. "We saw this in countries like Japan, [South] Korea, and Malaysia in 2003-2004," she said. Responses to H5N1 "first and foremost" required surveillance, Professor Pekosz said. "You have to be testing wild animals that are found sick and ideally even ones that are not in order to see where the virus is," he said. "For commercial and domesticated poultry, it's also about testing but since these infections are usually deadly for the animals, it is relatively easy to find cases of H5N1 in [them]." Once the virus was detected in a farm, authorities had to restrict the movement of animals and machinery to try to prevent the disease from spreading, Professor Pekosz said. South Korea, Japan and Thailand had restricted movement of poultry, and emphasised rapid detection, farm biosecurity and wild bird surveillance in managing outbreaks. "These measures work because poultry transmission is strongly shaped by human systems, bird movement, farm access, equipment, vehicles, crates, feed supply chains and workers," Dr Balasubramaniam said. "If those movements are interrupted early, the virus loses many of its opportunities to spread." Experts said one of the most important measures now for Australia was enhancing surveillance to understand the location and movement of the virus. Richard Webby, an expert in influenza at St Jude Children's Research Hospital, said this should be combined with messages informing poultry farmers of risks and encouraging them to use biosecurity measures against the spread of H5N1 from wildlife to poultry. Vaccination Some countries in Asia including China and Vietnam have also vaccinated poultry to contain bird flu. Authorities in China said they would vaccinate as many as 14 billion chickens, geese and ducks as H5N1 spread in the mid-2000s. "Widespread implementation of poultry vaccination in China has reduced incidence, but the virus has remained endemic," said Dr Webby, who is also the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds. For H5 viruses, poultry vaccination can reduce deaths, disease and virus spread, and protect food security, reduce economic loss and limit the need for repeated mass culling, Dr Balasubramaniam said. "But it is most valuable where the virus is already entrenched or where repeated culling is not socially, economically or logistically sustainable," he said. "It should be understood as a risk-reduction tool, not a standalone solution." Vaccination carried risks if vaccines were poorly matched with viruses, coverage was uneven or post-vaccination monitoring was weak, Dr Balasubramaniam said. "In that setting, vaccination may make disease less visible while allowing viral evolution to continue," he said. Australia should not "reflexively" adopt mass poultry vaccination at this stage, he said. "The most relevant Asian lessons are therefore speed, surveillance, biosecurity and trust." New territory? The disease had changed since it first emerged in Hong Kong and later spread through Asia nearly three decades ago, said University of Sydney veterinary epidemiologist Michael Ward. While responses in Asia then had focused on protecting poultry, H5N1 had evolved in recent years to cause mass mortality in wild animals, he said. "We don't have really a lot of history of this," Professor Ward said. "It's a slight variation on the virus, but in terms of its presentation, its epidemiology, it's almost a different disease. "Relying on that long 30-year history, there are some things … that we can apply, but things have changed quite a bit." While biosecurity measures would help stop it spreading to poultry, he said there was not much that could be done to protect wild animals from H5N1. Dr Samaan, from the WHO, said Australia's biosecurity also differed from countries in Asia. Its poultry industry was more commercially concentrated compared to some countries where backyard farms were common. Australia's industry had "strong biosecurity infrastructure and procedures to keep diseases out and to respond to outbreaks when they happen", she said. "Australia's early detection of avian influenza in a wild migratory seabird shows how proactive Australia's health and biosecurity monitoring systems are." She recommended that Australia treated the issue as a shared challenge requiring coordinated action across all sectors. "There is no single magic bullet to stopping outbreaks or new incursions of bird flu," she said. "It takes coordinated action across sectors and a sustained investment." Loading...