Chicken disease found almost a century ago could be key to controlling COVID-19 outbreaks, expert says

The poultry industry has a lot to teach the world about the future of coronavirus infection control, according to a University of Melbourne academic.

Professor Amir Hadjinoormohammadi works in avian medicine in the Asia Pacific Centre for Animal Health.

He said infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) found in chickens had many similarities to COVID-19.

“The learnings that we acquire from working with animal diseases can be applied to the way we control and diagnose diseases in humans,” he said.

The first coronavirus

Although the term coronavirus was yet to be coined, Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said the illness was first detected in chickens.

“The disease was first reported in 1931 in America, but there was suspicion that the disease was actually present a decade earlier than that,” he said.

“The primary presentation of the virus infection is respiratory illness.

“It manifests as a runny nose, conjunctivitis or runny eyes, coughing, sneezing and quite often mortality in affected susceptible chickens.”

Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said IBV not only presented with almost identical symptoms to COVID-19 but it also had a similar physical make-up.

“The name coronavirus was established later on, but in the 1930s’ they actually determined the structure and the shape of the virus,” he said.

IBV is present in most countries and spreads between chickens very quickly, infecting entire bird flocks in as little as 24 hours.

However, unlike what is currently known about COVID-19, IBV could spread through viral particles and exposure to faecal matter, Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said.

Living with the virus

There are multiple strains of IBV present in the world’s chicken population, and Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said that could be vital to future COVID-19 infection control in humans.

“I think if you want to extrapolate what the poultry industry has learned with IBV, we’ll probably face the same situation with SARS-COV-2,” he said.

“The two diseases have great similarities in terms of susceptibility to physical disinfection agents [like sanitisers] that are available to us.”

Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said there had been multiple attempts to stamp out Infectious Bronchitis Virus.

“The poultry industry has tried really hard to control the virus. They wanted to eradicate the disease, but soon they realised that it was impossible,” he said.

“It’s a globally important virus, found in pretty well every country with chickens, so there has been a lot of effort over the last ninety years to come up with effective vaccines.”

Mass vaccination

Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said the poultry industry had come up with different ways of vaccinating chickens.

“It’s very difficult to individually vaccinate the bird, but that is still done in some sectors of the industry,” he said.

Due to the difficulties, young chicks are often mass-vaccinated in the hatchery, Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said.

“This typically involves a spray vaccination or drinking water vaccination — quite often before the birds are transferred to a production site,” he said.

“Coronaviruses, in general, are very prone to changes in their genetic make-up, this occasionally causes the virus to be different in terms of its biology and the way the vaccine can provide protection.”

Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said the mutating nature of IBV often required new vaccines to protect the birds.

He said the constant evolution of vaccines was likely to be mirrored in the fight against COVID-19 in humans.

Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said new viruses had emerged throughout the years since the disease was reported in Australia in the 1960s.

“In Australia, we have at least two different kinds of vaccines that are used. One of them is probably more common,” he said.

“But every so often we have a new virus emerge, and we need to come up with a new strategy to tackle that.”