The German Minister of Agriculture, Alois Reiner, announced on Friday that the number of bird flu cases in the country has surged significantly and at an unusual rate over the past two weeks, prompting a call for enhanced preventive measures to curb the virus’s spread.
Reiner noted, “Currently, there are numerous outbreaks occurring in both wild animals and poultry farms. This is typical for this time of year.”
However, he emphasized that “the very rapid increase in infections over the last 14 days” highlights “the severity of the situation” and the “necessity of a coordinated and collective response.”
This week, officials in Germany raised alarms after environmentalists discovered over a thousand dead cranes near Berlin, believed to have succumbed to a significant bird flu outbreak.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Agriculture in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, announced the need to cull approximately 15,000 birds at a poultry farm in southern Germany due to confirmed bird flu infections by the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute (FLI), Germany’s research institute for animal health.