Birds culled in Europe flu scare

TURKISH authorities yesterday ordered farmers in a quarantined village in the west of the country to hand over their turkeys and chickens for culling or face fines in a bid to contain an outbreak of suspected bird flu.

In Romania, where the first suspected bird flu cases were reported on Friday, 40,000 birds are to be slaughtered in the coming days and authorities gave thousands of people a flu vaccine to prevent them from getting human flu.

Laboratories have not confirmed bird flu, let alone the presence of the H5N1 strain that experts are tracking, for fear it could mutate to become a human virus.