The government says it will allow the vaccination of chickens against the latest strain of bird flu at some farms with the highest levels of bio security, as the outbreak ravages the industry, leaving SA with an egg shortage and a likely increase in price of chicken.
The criteria for which chickens and farms can be vaccinated are still being developed, however.
The current outbreak, SA's largest in its history, is affecting five provinces: Gauteng, Mpumalanga, North West, the Free State and Limpopo.
At least 1.4-million chickens have died or been culled.
Smalltalk Daily analyst Anthony Clark said the reduction of egg supply was expected to be felt for a year as more than a quarter of the country’s laying hens had been culled or died from disease.
The department of agriculture, rural development and land reform has been under pressure from the poultry industry to deviate from a ban on vaccination. Culling and elimination of the disease was the strategy to contain the disease.
But the bird flu outbreak is spreading widely, despite farms’ best efforts to stop it. There is still no vaccine in SA, and there are applications at SA’s health product authority to authorise the importing of a vaccine.
“The department met vaccine registration regulators and the agreement reached is that the registration of the vaccine will be fast tracked, but the safety, efficacy and quality will not be compromised.”
The department of agriculture said strict criteria would be applied when deciding which businesses may vaccinate.
“The criteria under which vaccination will be permitted is almost in its final development, and only farms with good biosecurity and [that are] approved to vaccinate by the department will be given permission to vaccinate.”
All SA-listed poultry firms — Astral Foods, Quantum Foods, RCL Foods, which owns Rainbow Chickens — have been affected by the outbreak. Some were hit in April, when a different strain caused an outbreak in the Western Cape and more than 1.2-million chickens were culled or died.
There is no timeline as to when vaccination would start.
Both Quantum Foods and Astral Foods are expected to post a loss in their 2023 financial year, in part due to bird flu on top of costly load-shedding.
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