Credit China Daily - March 2006
#19,258
Readers with extremely long memories will remember the great shuttlecock shortage of 2006, which was blamed - at least partially - on China's reported culling of roughly 200 million birds between 2003-2006 due to HPAI H5N1.
This was back when China actually acknowledged avian flu outbreaks in their poultry or wild birds, something which rarely happens today. The most recent FAO avian flu activity map (since Oct 1st 2025) shows almost no HPAI H5 in Mainland China.
Of course, South Korea and Japan both saw major avian flu outbreaks, and in South Korea they are still dealing with a serious egg shortage due to the culling of 11 million birds last winter.
While it seems reasonable to assume that China (and Russia) both saw some poultry losses from avian flu last winter, you wouldn't know it from their official reports.
All of which brings us to a Yonhap News report overnight which reads almost beat-for-beat like the 2006 article posted above. So much so, I had to double check to make sure it wasn't a phantom news report from the past.
Badminton Shuttlecock Prices in Japan Soar... Shortage of Chinese Duck and Goose Feathers
Posted July 23, 2026, 15:30
They report a `stagnant demand for duck meat', which they attribute to `changing Chinese diary habits', which has resulted in a growing shortage of duck and goose feathers, and is forcing a move towards using `synthetic shuttlecocks'.
While this article provides few details, it does state:
`However, as avian influenza (AI) has recently been rampant, disease control costs have increased due to concerns about infection, worsening the management of poultry farms and leading to a shortage of feathers, a raw material.'
Perhaps the most important caveat is, although this article mentions avian influenza as a potential factor, that doesn't necessarily mean HPAI H5. China continues to battle multiple avian viruses, including LPAI H9N2, H3Nx, H6Nx, and H10Nx viruses. Some recent blogs include:
Virulence: Surveillance and biological characterization of H3 subtype avian influenza viruses in Eastern China
J. Inf.: Zoonotic Threat of Novel H6N2 Avian Influenza Virus with Internal Genes Exclusively Derived from H9N2, China, 2025
Vet. Microbiology: The novel H10N3 Avian Influenza Virus Acquired Airborne Transmission Among Chickens: An Increasing Threat to Public Health
Admittedly, this reported shortage of duck feathers is a weak signal at best, but the paucity of official reports from China makes it worth our notice, since we've seen other similarly vague news items prove to be significant in the past.
In 2008 a report by Helen Branswell (then of the Canadian Press) described an early signal of the first SARS-CoV outbreak in 2002. She reported:
Surging vinegar sales in China grabbed the attention of the folks who regularly scour the globe for what might be budding disease outbreaks, like those who work for the Canadian-led Global Public Health Intelligence Network.
"We were getting lots of rumours, like a lot of sales of vinegar," explains Dick Thompson, who was the spokesperson for the World Health Organization's communicable diseases section at the time.
“Vinegar in southern China is used as a disinfectant. And so if there’s a run on vinegar, there’d be a suspicion that there was some kind of infectious disease or a widespread belief that there is an infectious disease outbreak. So at these meetings we’d been hearing this kind of drip, drip, drip come in about that.”
While our visibility of avian flu in China is limited, it is worth noting that last November - in China MOA Announces New Guidelines to Expedite Animal Vaccine Strain Approvals - we saw a rare acknowledgement that their agricultural vaccines program (including avian flu) was in need of an overhaul.
Whether today's report turns out to be significant remains to be seen. Like I said, it is probably nothing.
But, it does seem curious enough to warrant a mention.
