Portugal Recovers WOAH Avian-Flu-Free Country Status After 26-Foco H5N1 Window Closes — DGAV Confirms 4 May Reset on the December 2-26 2025 Outbreak Cycle, Bird Confinement Already Lifted in April

Portugal has reclaimed its formal status as a country free of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the Direção-Geral de Alimentação e Veterinária confirmed on Monday, 4 May 2026. The validation, issued by the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, the body still widely cited under its former OIE acronym), closes the 2025/2026 H5N1 cycle in Portuguese territory and reopens the cleanest possible sanitary lane for the country's poultry exporters.

The DGAV statement reads: "Após a implementação das medidas de controlo e erradicação dos focos ocorridos em Portugal entre 2 de dezembro e 26 de dezembro de 2025, Portugal recuperou o estatuto de país livre da gripe aviária de alta patogenicidade." Twenty-six confirmed outbreaks were notified during the 2025/2026 season, all of them concentrated inside that 25-day December window. Sanitary control and eradication measures — culling, restriction zones, surveillance perimeters — were imposed in line with EU animal-health rules and WOAH guidance.

From a 25-Day December Outbreak Cycle to the April Confinement Lift

The 2025/2026 cycle was unusually compressed. After the first foco was confirmed on 2 December 2025, infection notifications stacked up over the next three and a half weeks before the last positive read on 26 December. DGAV imposed indoor confinement on commercial and backyard flocks across designated risk zones during the active phase, and stepped up movement controls and biosecurity audits at slaughterhouses, packing centres and live-bird points.

By April 2026, with no new positives logged for more than 90 days and the post-outbreak surveillance reads coming back clean, DGAV lifted the obligation to confine birds. That decision was the necessary epidemiological precursor to today's WOAH validation: the 90-day clean window, post-cleansing-and-disinfection of affected premises, is what triggers the international free-status reset under WOAH's terrestrial-animals code.

Why the Free-Country Stamp Matters for the Poultry Trade

The free-country status is not a domestic label — it is a trade instrument. Third countries that import Portuguese poultry, eggs or genetic material rely on it to keep market access open without bilateral derogations. During the active outbreak window, Portuguese exporters faced the standard suite of restrictions: regionalisation requests, supplementary testing, in some cases blanket suspensions on shell eggs or live birds depending on the importer's epidemiological policy.

The 4 May reset means those constraints fall away. For the larger Portuguese poultry groups — names like Avibom, Lusiaves and Sociedade Agrícola da Quinta da Freiria sit in the upper tier — the immediate operational benefit is the clean lane on documentation, the ability to issue veterinary certificates without the regional caveats that the December outbreaks forced into circulation.

The Bigger Picture — Wild-Bird Pressure Has Become Structural

The 26-foco cycle that just closed was the latest in what European veterinary services now treat as a standing seasonal H5N1 pressure carried by wild migratory birds. EFSA's quarterly avian-influenza overviews have flagged Portugal, alongside Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the Nordic countries, as part of a wide front of recurring exposure that has yet to revert to pre-2021 baseline.

For DGAV, the operational implication is that the surveillance machinery built up over the past four cycles — wild-bird sampling, biosecurity audits at commercial farms, compulsory reporting on backyard flocks — now becomes year-round infrastructure rather than seasonal mobilisation. Today's free-country headline is genuine relief for the sector. But the next 2026/2027 cycle starts the moment the autumn migration pulls down through the Atlantic flyway, and the surveillance teams know it.