Bird Flu Hits Foie Gras Farmers as Lethal Strains Sweep Europe
- More than 3.5 million birds dead in widest outbreak since 2016
- More cases are likely in the coming months, Rabobank says
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More than 3.5 million birds across Europe, including the ducks used for France’s famed foie gras, have died from avian flu since October in the most far-reaching outbreak on the continent in four years.
New cases of highly contagious strains of H5N8 and H5N1 have been found in at least a dozen nations, killing birds or forcing farms to cull poultry to keep the virus at bay, according to data from the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health. The casualties include hundreds of thousands of ducks in France as well as turkeys, chickens and egg-laying hens in Poland, the European Union’s top poultry producer.