South Africa reports H5N1 bird flu on poultry farms, international agency says
The cases were the first in South Africa since September last year, Paris-based WOAH said in a notification.
South Africa's poultry sector has been recovering from an outbreak in 2023 that led to the loss of a third of the national chicken flock. The industry has been wary of a resurgence of the diseases amid criticism of the rollout of a government vaccination programme.
Bird flu has ravaged poultry flocks worldwide in recent years, including in the United States, and top poultry exporter Brazil this year reported its first known case on a commercial farm.
In South Africa, the new outbreaks killed 1,150 poultry birds on the affected firms, Paris-based WOAH said, citing South African authorities.
This included 300 birds killed on a farm in Tswaing in North West province and 850 birds that died on a farm in Mkhondo in Mpumalanga province.
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News24
a day ago
- News24
A threat to vultures is a threat to people: Inside Kruger's vulture poisoning crisis
Supplied Kruger National Park officials have raised the alarm over a mass poisoning that killed over 120 vultures, calling it one of the worst in recent years and warning it could push the endangered species towards extinction. Rescue teams managed to save 81 vultures through an unprecedented joint operation. Experts warn that the poison used – an organophosphate so lethal it's nicknamed 'two-step' – poses severe risks to humans, pets and water systems, with even trace exposure potentially fatal. In the heart of the Kruger National Park, conservationists are racing against time to protect one of the most critically endangered species on the continent – the vulture. A mass poisoning incident early in May, in the Mahlangeni section of the park, left more than 120 vultures dead and reignited concerns over escalating threats to biodiversity, public health and the safety of South Africa's most iconic national park. Kruger Park rangers, working in partnership with wildlife NGOs and rehabilitation experts, mounted what they described as one of the largest vulture rescue operations in history, saving 84 poisoned birds, 81 of which were successfully rehabilitated and released. But the victory is bittersweet. Acting swiftly may have saved a few dozen, but dozens more died, and the long-term implications remain grim. 'It was a collaborative effort and quite an incredible effort,' said Mahlangeni section ranger Andrew Desmet. We lost over 120 vultures, but we saved 84. It was only due to the collaborative effort that we were able to respond quickly. Andrew Desmet The poisoning scene City Press recently visited the site near Mahlangeni where the poisoned vultures had been discovered – a grim, desolate space still reeking of decay. The area is located over 3km from the closest patrol base, deep within the bush. The scene is seared into Desmet's memory. 'You can just imagine ... vultures dead; others half-dead, flapping around. The vulture doesn't think you're there to save it; it thinks you're there to kill it,' he said. 'They bite you; they run from you. Once you catch one, you can't let it go. And we were 3km from help.' The poisoned carcass – an elephant – had been butchered for meat. Its remains were laced with highly toxic organophosphates, known among rangers as 'two-step' poisons. They call some of these poisons 'two-step' because it's so toxic. If you get a little bit in you, you literally take two steps and you're dead. Andrew Desmet Lunga Simelane This was not just a targeted attack on vultures. Desmet explained that poisoning kills indiscriminately: predators, scavengers and even humans who may unknowingly consume or touch contaminated meat or water. 'If you poison a carcass, you don't only kill vultures; you kill any scavenger or predator that comes and feeds. Humans who come into contact with that meat can die. The poison can wash into water systems,' he warned. READ: Vultures just years away from extinction in Kruger park Technology and rapid response The incident might have gone unnoticed if not for tracking technology. A few vultures in the region carry satellite-linked GPS 'backpacks' – expensive but vital tools for monitoring bird movements. 'You can't track every vulture. But vultures congregate. If you see three birds with tracking units, there are probably 100 birds there,' said Desmet. The alert came late at night, around 9pm, when one of the GPS units registered a mortality signal. Desmet and his team launched into emergency response mode, coordinating aerial patrols and ground teams. He was airborne by dawn, flying a light aircraft over the area. 'I could see the elephant carcass, and I could see many dead vultures. But more urgently, I saw about 50 vultures flopping around – still alive but clearly poisoned,' he said. Helicopters were deployed to extract birds, and one of the most critical allies arrived on the scene: the Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, led by Nikita Rapo. 'As we arrived, we started with the treatment,' said Rapo. The first step is an injection of atropine. Then we milk the crop to remove the poisoned meat, administer activated charcoal and then give fluids every two hours to flush the poison. Nikita Rapo Out of the 84 vultures taken to the centre, only three died. One succumbed during transportation, another had a broken pelvis, and a third suffered from aspiration complications. The remaining 81 were rehabilitated and released after two weeks. 'The poison slows the heart, shuts the body down' Leah Brown, a veterinary nurse with Wildscapes Veterinary Services, who assisted with the recovery operation, explained the critical role of atropine in treating poisoned vultures – and how deadly the toxins are to any organism exposed. 'What the poison actually does to the body is that it slows the heart rate down to a point where the animal can no longer circulate its own blood,' said Brown. 'If your heart fails, you won't survive, so the medicine Nikita mentioned – atropine – is crucial. It works to elevate the heart rate and keep the circulatory system going so that we can at least try to treat everything else that's happening. As long as the cardiovascular system is working, then we can try to work on whatever else is going on.' Brown warned that these organophosphate toxins are so potent that even trace exposure poses a serious health risk to humans and animals. We will suffer the same effects, so we shouldn't ingest these toxins either because they're going to have similar effects on our neurosystem. Leah Brown 'You don't wear your shoes inside the house; you need to clean them thoroughly. Any little trace of these toxins – they're so potent. You walk it through your house, and your dog accidentally licks the floor – that's all it takes.' Field teams wore gloves at all times, though handling struggling birds with sharp beaks often damaged their protective equipment. 'We tried our best just to keep our hands covered as much as possible ... and to not touch any contaminated meat at all. We kept the regurgitated food in a bucket, and that bucket gets burnt with the fire.' A deeper environmental threat For Kruger, the stakes go beyond a single event. 'We're very, very concerned about the Kruger park and our vulture population,' Desmet said. 'It's nesting time now, and with these poisonings, you're wiping out generations of vultures.' Vultures are known as nature's undertakers. Their role in the ecosystem is vital – they consume rotting carcasses that would otherwise spread disease and contaminate water sources. 'Without them, you would get carcasses just rotting slowly in the veld. That would spread disease and have a negative impact on the environment,' Desmet said. While rhino poaching garners widespread attention, vulture poisonings are becoming just as alarming. Desmet noted that, while rhinos are listed as vulnerable or endangered, 'vultures are currently classified as endangered'. Understaffed and overwhelmed Part of the challenge is scale. The Mahlangeni section alone spans over 100 000 hectares, with more than 40km of boundary fence. Despite this, it is typically patrolled by just eight field rangers – often fewer due to sick leave or rotation. 'You divide them into twos for safety, which means only four patrols covering this vast area. It's almost an impossible task,' Desmet said. Kruger's strategy has shifted towards community engagement, building trust and cooperation with people living adjacent to the park. 'We don't protect the park for ourselves. Our job is to protect it for you – the public, your children and your children's children,' Desmet said. 'But we need the communities to work with us.' Meat, not ivory Unlike many poaching incidents targeting elephants for their tusks, this case was about meat. 'The main thing these poachers were after was meat,' Desmet confirmed. 'They harvested meat from the elephant and, when they finished, they laced the carcass with poison.' This trend of commercial bushmeat trade using poison is growing, and it threatens not only wildlife but also community health and regional stability. What now? While the rescue operation stands as a model of rapid coordination, Desmet acknowledges that the tools are reactive, responding only after the damage begins. The ultimate goal must be prevention. 'Ideally, we want to get to a situation where we could stop the poisoning altogether,' Desmet said. 'That's where we actually need to be.'
News24
a day ago
- News24
From apartheid's all-white world to HIV frontlines: The activist doctor with a 5-year fix for SA healthcare
HIV researcher Francois Venter heads up Ezintsha, the Wits-based medical research centre, and is known for speaking without any regard for self-preservation – something a lecturer friend calls 'borderline cancel language'. Venter grew up under apartheid, weaned on Springbok radio and weekly military-style marching drills in Phalaborwa, Limpopo, where he was one of seven children and – until he landed at Wits – had 'never met a black person who wasn't a servant'. Sean Christie talked to him about his unorthodox inaugural full professorship lecture, his work during the height of the Aids crisis, the Trump administration's defunding of HIV and scientific research and his shoot-from-the-hip fix of our healthcare system. An inaugural lecture is a formal event thrown by a university to commemorate the lecturer's appointment to full professorship. They are usually pinnacle-of-career moments. Francois Venter's inaugural lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2023 was not typical. He began by recounting years of successfully dodging requests to deliver the lecture, often blaming the university's email system for his lack of response. While he dutifully name-checked his professional role models and heroes, he also took the opportunity to give credit to his tennis and rock climbing coaches. Interwoven with these acknowledgements were lively anecdotes - such as drinking tequila with Dexter Holland of The Offspring rock band (who earned a PhD in molecular biology in 2017) and receiving not one, but two, untimely calls from Standard Bank ('I swear I turned this off …'). Venter's aversion to formalism, it seems, remains resolutely untreated. 'I hate, hate, hate talking about myself,' he warns. We are sitting in the immaculate boardroom of Ezintsha, the Wits-based medical research centre that Venter leads. Ezintsha came to international attention in 2019 after the results of a clinical trial called ADVANCE were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study showed the effectiveness of new HIV therapies and, perhaps more importantly, demonstrated why it is important that clinical trials be conducted in the contexts in which the drugs are mainly consumed. The therapies worked, but as Venter puts it, 'with complications peculiar to local populations, far from the sanitised world of curated pharmaceutical studies done on healthy white men.' Venter, by this time, was already well known for his work in HIV, not only for his scientific outputs but for taking up cudgels on behalf of people living with HIV. Venter's response to being singled out is predictable: 'There are so many people in the HIV world who did much more, and more bravely.' It is the refrain of many treatment activists, and it was no deterrent to my questions about his childhood in the Lowveld town of Phalaborwa. 'The town has a paint colour named after it – Phalaborwa Dust – a sort of dull grey, which says everything, really,' says Venter, who was born in 1969, the first of seven children. Venter's Afrikaans-speaking father worked as an accountant for the Palabora Mining Company, while his English mother ran a creche. 'You couldn't have a family that size today,' he says. 'They managed because the company subsidised everything from education to golf club memberships.' In a time of grand apartheid, Venter's world was particularly white and insular. 'Growing up, I never met a black person who wasn't a servant,' he admits. Supplied/Bhekisia 'I worked like crazy at school, knowing that was my ticket out of there,' says Venter, who worried his lowveld credentials would make him the odd man out at Wits medical school. 'Instead, I walked into this amazing diversity of people. For a boy who grew up on Springbok radio, it was more than I had dreamed of,' he says. Cancel language Venter is tall, powerfully built. The sharp edges of a forearm tattoo peek out of the sleeve of a black puffer jacket. His disposition is nervous, though, his speech often self-effacing, although mention one of his many bugbears and a quiet fury brims. Venter is known for speaking without any regard to 'self-preservation'. Like a good journalist, he calls it as he sees it. Supplied/Bhekisisa The comparison pleases Venter, who was editor of the campus newspaper, Wits Student, in 1991. The publication had been overtly political since depicting Prime Minister John Vorster in a butcher's outfit in 1973. 'I enjoyed the cut and thrust of the media, and understanding its place in political life,' says Venter, who credits journalism with making him a better HIV researcher and political organiser. He describes his involvement in student politics as an almost involuntary act, akin to staying afloat in a turbulent river. 'The late 80s were some of the worst for apartheid repression. Fellow students were being detained and tortured, their families maimed and disappeared. There was nowhere for a white person to hide, and joining the fight [against apartheid] was the only moral choice.' Medicine, in those first years, was at the edge of Venter's concerns. He maintains he was a 'mediocre student' although he pulled his socks up in his fifth year. Dying in Baragwanath Healthcare provided Venter with a clear view of the twistedness of apartheid policy. 'You go into the black hospitals and it's like, jeez, the things that are happening there. Meanwhile, white people are receiving world-class care,' says Venter, who did his 'house job' (residency) at Hillbrow Hospital, which is where he first encountered HIV as a student. 'It was the beginning of that incredible surge in numbers that occurred between 1993 and 1997. The first cases I saw were returning political exiles,' says Venter, who experienced an internal snap after an incident in a Yeoville restaurant. 'It was 1995. Rocky Street was still quite eclectic and happening, and I was hanging out in a restaurant run by this Caribbean guy I knew. He had booted out a young drug addict, who went across the street and bought a knife, came back and stabbed him in the heart. It was 10am. I tried to resuscitate him, but I had nothing. He bled to death in front of me, and I was like, f*ck South Africa and its trauma and violence.' Venter boarded a plane for the United Kingdom, and a hospital job he found 'terminally boring'. By 1997, he was back in Johannesburg, specialising in internal medicine. The HIV epidemic was at its zenith, and hospitals across the country were overwhelmed. 'In some of the hospitals, like Bara (Baragwanath Hospital), you just left patients in casualty, and they would die there and go out the door. 'In Joburg Gen (Johannesburg General Hospital, today Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital), you put them on the floor in the corridors, and they died there waiting for a bed. It was brutal,' says Venter. 'The numbers had surged with a suddenness and severity that we still don't really understand. Nelson Mandela was trying to prevent a race war. There really wasn't much that he, or anybody else, could have done. I didn't understand the transmission enough, and we didn't have the tools to prevent it.' Toxic - and incredibly effective On completion of his specialist time ,Venter was burnt out and unsure of what to do with his life. He was interested in HIV, sparked by his experience of looking after a haemophiliac in 1997. 'The patient was one of a group that had HIV after receiving infected blood imported from the US by the state in the 1980s. 'The apartheid government took a decision to pay for their treatment with what was then extremely expensive antiretroviral therapy (ART), and the ANC government continued this,' says Venter, who was amazed at the impact of the drugs on his patient. 'I saw this patient in ICU just come off a ventilator, which just did not happen in those days.' Venter was offered a job with the Wits-based Clinical HIV Research Unit by world-renowned HIV expert Ian Sanne, who, says Venter, 'taught me how to do clinical trials, how to play with these toxic, incredibly effective drugs, and it was really the first time I was able to start seeing myself as someone who was going to get involved in HIV. The drugs have evolved since then, now more effective with almost no side effects.' It was also where Venter started interacting with the NGOs and activists then taking the fight for affordable antiretroviral therapies to the government. The Treatment Action Campaign had started smuggling them into the country. 'It was devastating, though, watching them fighting our government to even acknowledge HIV existed, while their members died needing those drugs. The hypocrisy of senior political figures, many of whom had family members on ARVs (antiretrovirals) I was treating, yet didn't call out Mbeki, is unforgivable.' He then joined Professor Helen Rees' Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Initiative and began working out of Esselen Street Clinic, an old Hillbrow facility home to the first South African HIV testing site, and from where he ran a huge US government-funded HIV support programme for the next decade across several provinces, gaining experience in expanding primary care approaches in chronic diseases. Sponsored by Since those heady Esselen days, many important clinical trials, HIV programmes, research papers and court cases have gone under the bridge, and Venter has become part of the moral conscience of South Africa. For years, Ezintsha was based in a Yeoville house and Hillbrow back rooms, around which sewage spills split and foamed. Now, it occupies two floors of a large office block in Parktown, an environment of biometric access controls and curvilinear glass, employing 150 people. On the upper floor is the Sleep Clinic, where patients with suspected sleep disorders lie back on R50 000 mattresses sponsored by the company. READ | Struggling with a sleep disorder? First-of-its-kind sleep clinic launched in Johannesburg 'The quid pro quo is that they be allowed to advertise,' says a faintly apologetic Venter. The Sleep Clinic also houses a new obesity clinic, where Venter sees patients with South Africa's new pandemic. 'The new drugs for obesity are every bit as revolutionary as the HIV drugs,' he says, 'but every bit as fiddly as antiretrovirals were in 2000'. New studies, using these wonder drugs in people with both HIV and obesity, are being hatched here to try to improve primary care for diabetes, hypertension and other common diseases in South Africa. The race to the bottom The transit away from the streets into cushy offices is one that many organisations working on HIV have made in recent years. 'It is nice not to have to worry about staff being pistol-whipped while at work,' remarks Venter, but donor funding, while key to the fight against HIV in South Africa, has also distanced organisations from communities, and created a dependency which, following the collapse of the US government's Aids fund, Pepfar, and the United States International Agency for International Development, USAID, threatens catastrophe. READ | How the health department will deal with Pepfar's near collapse 'What happened still feels quite unthinkable. It is extremely frustrating that our systems have not been made sustainable and are now on the brink of collapse as a result of Pepfar having been interwoven with the national HIV programme to such an extent everything unravels when it is stopped.' Venter sketches a scenario, in which South Africa's HIV response – 'the one effective programme we have' – is misleadingly characterised as 'too expensive', and dragged down to the lowest common denominator, 'leading to the same terrible outcomes you find in crap programmes, like diabetes'. 'A race to the bottom, in other words,' says Venter. 'We have poor indicators for almost every health metric outside of HIV, TB and vaccines, and even those are now slipping, due to the health department dropping the ball. 'Both our public and private health services are an expensive mess, for very different reasons. The health minister has been in charge for most of the last 17 years, we have endless excellent white papers and policy documents that gather dust, and little to show for the continent's most expensive health system.' Will this grim scenario prevail, or will South African healthcare be shepherded through the labyrinth of budget cuts and misfiring systems? Venter doesn't see why not. Venter says: Our problems are systemic, and we have enough resources and brains to fix them. He pauses to mull the judiciousness of his next point. 'I'll tell you what you do. You take the top people from the medical aids and tell them: You can't be head of Discovery or the Government Employee Medical Scheme, Gems, anymore, lead with the best people from academia, from government, the private sector, donors, civil society, form a focused group with teeth, and run the health system. 'We all declare our interests, put an end to corruption, and everyone from the president and the minister of health down in government must use the public healthcare system when using their medical aid. If they experience the system first-hand, they will have an immediate investment in assisting those fixing it. 'Start using the innovations South Africans are world leaders in, including data systems. If we do that, I am telling you we will fix the system in five years.' Venter, clearly, has already rolled up his sleeves for this new fight. It will be interesting to see who joins him.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
South Africa reports H5N1 bird flu on poultry farms, international agency says
PARIS (Reuters) -South Africa has reported the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, on two poultry farms in the country, the World Organisation for Animal Health said on Wednesday. The cases were the first in South Africa since September last year, Paris-based WOAH said in a notification. South Africa's poultry sector has been recovering from an outbreak in 2023 that led to the loss of a third of the national chicken flock. The industry has been wary of a resurgence of the diseases amid criticism of the rollout of a government vaccination programme. Bird flu has ravaged poultry flocks worldwide in recent years, including in the United States, and top poultry exporter Brazil this year reported its first known case on a commercial farm. In South Africa, the new outbreaks killed 1,150 poultry birds on the affected firms, Paris-based WOAH said, citing South African authorities. This included 300 birds killed on a farm in Tswaing in North West province and 850 birds that died on a farm in Mkhondo in Mpumalanga province.
