119 outbreaks were detected in the department, where the Minister of Agriculture was expected on Friday.
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“When the health services come to recover the bodies of dead ducks, there may well be that of a breeder,” says Guylène Bernadet, whose farm she runs with her husband, Pascal, is hit by the flu avian. In Sort-en-Chalosse, 10 kilometers from Dax, the village of 975 souls, which has about fifteen breeders, is hit hard by bird flu. It is one of the 119 outbreaks detected in the Landes. If M me Bernadet has already seen her 2,600 ducks slaughtered for prevention, it is now the 4,400 chickens on the farm who are waiting to be.
“After emotion, then resignation, now comes anger,” says Pascal Bernadet, also mayor of the village. Because for the past few days, the couple has been collecting chickens that have fallen overnight every morning. “Half of them died in four days,” laments the breeder, who hopes to obtain information on the rest of the process. In the meantime, large waterproof bags filled with corpses are piling up on the farm. “Nobody gave us anything to store the dead,” laments Ms. Bernadet.
“The lessons of the last bird flu in 2017 have not been fired, gets angry Mr. Bernadet. If the State had let the profession do, we would have done better. But they do not trust us, so we can not trust him “, explains the city councilor .
500 meters away, at the Houn farm, its owner, Richard Commarieu, is in the same state of mind. Its 3,285 ducks were slaughtered on January 2, affected by avian influenza. “People in the offices in Paris decide for us and decide badly in some cases,” he explains, pointing to a now empty hangar. “The health services are still asking questions about how to manage the crisis, we do not understand”, he adds.
Rising wave
At Serge Mora, president of the Modef des Landes union, the avian flu virus appeared on December 31, 2020 in a shelter that houses ducklings, installed on its farm in Mugron en Chalosse, in the south of the department. “We had one sick duckling on December 31, two on January 1 st and today, out of 650 ducklings, 350 have died.” The farmer thus describes the virulence of the H5N8 virus, which, after making its first appearance in a pet store in Corsica in mid-November 2020, was discovered in a Landes farm on December 6.
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