All European Union countries have plans to fight a possible bird flu pandemic, health officials said today, as tests confirmed the deadly strain of the virus had reached Croatia.

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.

An Indonesian man has died of bird flu, raising the country’s human toll to four, officials said today, as international health experts prepared to go house-to-house to search for infected poultry.