On Jun. 25, 2024, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) announced that they planned to offer a preemptive bird flu vaccination to some workers with exposure to animals, making it the first country in the world to do so. The Nordic country bought vaccines for 10,000 people, each consisting of two injections, as part of a joint EU procurement of up to 40 million doses for 15 nations from manufacturer CSL Seqirus.

Widespread outbreaks of bird flu among mink and foxes at Finland’s mostly open-air fur farms led to the culling in 2013 of some 485,000 animals to stop the virus from spreading among the animals as well as to humans.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed or caused the culling of hundreds of millions of poultry globally in recent years and has increasingly been spreading to mammals, including cows in the United States and, in some cases, also to humans. Finland has not detected the virus in humans, THL said.