Defra launched the 24-week study earlier this month, to assess how effectively vaccines can protect turkeys against highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).

Outbreaks in recent years have devastated poultry businesses across the country - particularly in the sector's East Anglian heartlands, where hundreds of thousands of chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese have been culled.

Mark Gorton, founder of Traditional Norfolk Poultry, based at Shropham near Attleborough, had been leading the calls for faster progress in rolling out bird flu vaccines - and now the UK's first trials are taking place on his company's farms in East Anglia.

He said: "It's a massive step forward, a great thing for the industry - and having pushed for this for so many years to actually now be running the trial on our own farms is something else.

"We're now two weeks into it, so we're at the coal face.

"This is the first time this has been done in the UK - trials have been done around Europe but a lot of those are still only lab trials.

"This is proper field trial. We're treating these birds no differently to how we would treat any other birds. It's field scale, so it's a shed full of birds, basically.

"They won't be free range because we're taking every single care we can from a biosecurity perspective. But they are proper Christmas bronze turkeys that we grow on our farms."

A bird flu vaccine trial is under way on turkeys in East Anglia (Image: Newsquest)

The new trials will focus on turkeys, which are highly susceptible to avian influenza.

Mr Gorton said: "We've chosen turkeys, partly because they're high value birds, but also because they live quite long. We're going to take these birds through to 24 weeks of age. So we've got to make sure that when we give a booster dose that lasts for their entire life.

"That's part of the trial as well. They had their initial vaccination in the hatchery as day-olds, and then we're going to boost them again, probably around six weeks old, so then we'll be testing the birds later in their life to see if the vaccine has lasted.

"This vaccine, at the moment, is an injection, but there's talk that in the future it could be an 'in ovo' vaccination or maybe a spray vaccine. It's all just early days, really.

"The trial at the moment is just for turkeys. But the data we get from the turkeys will set the stall out for everything else. I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we'll vaccinate everything, because some birds like broiler chickens, for example, just don't get old enough. But turkeys, laying hens, breeding chickens and ducks, they'd be the ones that everybody's talking about that would probably be viable to vaccinate."

Mr Gorton is also a member of both the National Farmers' Union's poultry board and the government's avian influenza taskforce.

He said the trial will last until the summer, so the results will not be known before this year's Christmas flocks are already "on the ground".

But he said it remained vital for the industry to keep up the pressure to overcome legislative barriers to any future vaccine roll-out.

"We have to keep pushing the government and the authorities to get the legislation in place so that we can commercially use this for next year," he said. "That's what we're pushing for.

"We've finally made a start. But we have got to keep the momentum going on, and we've got to keep pressurising our local MPs, and everybody else.

"As we're sitting here today we haven't really had too many [bird flu] cases since Christmas, and everybody starts to forget about it, gets complacent again. But we must not sit back now."

© Eastern Daily Press