Lab tests on chickens have confirmed Pakistan’s first two cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Israeli officials ordered the destruction of turkey flocks in three farming communities following bird flu tests, the Agriculture Ministry said today.

China urged other governments today to share more information about bird flu cases in people to prevent a human pandemic.

The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has been found in domestic birds for the first time in Germany, a state spokeswoman said today.

A second case of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus has been confirmed in a wild duck in France, Agriculture Ministry officials said today.

Turkey has slaughtered 764,000 fowl nationwide in its fight to contain the bird flu outbreak, the government’s bird flu crisis centre said today.

Vets have found a type of bird flu among hundreds of dead birds in Ukraine’s Black Sea region of Crimea, the Agriculture Ministry said today.

China has called bird flu a “serious epidemic” and reported three new outbreaks of the deadly virus in different parts of the country, while Canada announced multiple new cases but stressed they are not the virulent strain that has swept across Asia.

China’s Ministry of Agriculture today announced three new outbreaks of bird flu, two in the west and one in the south, resulting in the killing of nearly 175,000 birds, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China and Vietnam banned poultry imports from countries with bird flu as US and Chinese officials met today to co-ordinate strategy on stopping the spread of the deadly virus.

A bird-flu outbreak has killed 545 chickens and ducks in a village in central China in the country’s third case of the disease in two weeks, the government announced today.

Indonesia and Switzerland have barred the import of Brazilian meat, raising to 43 the number of countries that have restricted imports since an outbreak here of foot-and-mouth disease, the government said yesterday.

The EU was readying precautionary measures tonight, including the stockpiling of more anti-viral drugs, amid confirmation that the bird flu virus found in Turkish poultry was the H5N1 strain that scientists worry might mutate and cause a pandemic in humans.

Turkish authorities said today they had finished culling birds in a quarantined area where preliminary tests detected bird flu and urged people not to panic, saying that the disease had been contained, media reported.

Eleven wildfires burned out of control today in northern and central Portugal, where the heat and drought of the summer are stretching into autumn.

Japan confirmed its 16th case of mad cow disease today in a nine-year-old cow from northern Japan, the government said.

ZIMBABWE’S government yesterday announced plans to seize tractors and equipment from white farmers who have been thrown off their properties under President Robert Mugabe’s farm-seizure programme.

Suspected cases of foot-and-mouth are being investigated in Palestine.

The Dutch government has imposed an immediate ban on national transports of livestock in response to the first case of foot and mouth in continental Europe.