An urgent need for research into preventing the spread of the disease was created by the rise of bird flu last year.
Prof Ian Brown, head of the government's Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha), said that the record of 26 H5N1 outbreaks in 2021 has been shattered.
The number of people keeping chickens or ducks may be increasing. Many of the keepers don't have to register because of the small number of birds.
The majority of our cases have been in those settings. They are in large commercial farms all the way down to the person who keeps two chickens in their back yard. That is a huge change in terms of the food security risk, public health risk and animal welfare.
After last year's bird flu outbreak caused alarm and disruption among poultry farmers, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs set up the Apha consortium at a rapid pace.
There have been several bird flu events in the UK over the past decade. We seem to be getting an event every year and it is on a bigger scale.
The risk to humans isn't very high. There have been no human-to-human transmission of bird flu since it emerged two decades ago.
The risks of zoonotic diseases, which can be transmitted from animals to humans, have been underscored by the Covid epidemic. The more humans are in contact with birds in an uncontrollable way, the greater is the theoretical risk that people can get infections. Reducing the burden in birds can reduce the risk to humans.
Researchers are looking at data from last winter to find out which practices make farms less vulnerable to bird flu. Free-range eggs were unavailable in Britain for five weeks due to the government ordering all birds to be kept indoors.
Brown said that the virus moves between birds through droplets. Bird snot and feces are other ways to transmit diseases. The problem may be caused by infectious droppings from wild birds. The virus will live for about eight weeks even at 4C.
Understanding how and why wild birds fall sick is one of the areas of research being done. Thousands of birds have died in Scotland and most of them are gannets.
Some of these are vulnerable to the virus. The birds get very close when they breed in the summer. It goes through these colonies.
Why is bird flu being reported again?
Some of the greatest mixing occurs in central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan on an avian version of the Silk Road due to wild bird migration.
Last year, the virus didn't disappear from Europe in the summer. It made it to North America for the first time. Since few birds cross the Atlantic, it is likely that the viruses were spread by birds in the far north, which raises questions about whether the changing climate is also affecting the spread.
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