Romanians kill thousands of birds to prevent virus spreading

Authorities were culling thousands of domestic birds in Romania today to prevent the spread of a deadly strain of bird flu that has decimated flocks and killed dozens of people in Asia.

Officials said they were also awaiting test results from a British laboratory on samples sent from Maliuc, a village about 20 miles from Ceamurlia de Jos, where the H5N1 bird flu strain was first detected in Romania.

Authorities around the world fear the H5N1 strain could mutate into a form that can be passed among people, leading to a flu pandemic which some say could potentially kill millions.

Romanian officials said all domestic birds in Ceamurlia de Jos were killed and the village was being disinfected, but the area would remain under quarantine for 21 days before it could be declared free of the virus.

“We finished (killing domestic fowl) in Ceamurlia de Jos,” said Gabriel Predoi, who heads the national Agency for Animal Health, adding that authorities were hoping to also complete the cull of all birds in Maliuc today.

Authorities were also spraying chemicals in resident’s yards and homes, including around their refrigerators, kitchens and other areas which may have come in contact with infected birds.

Both Ceamurlia de Jos and Maliuc are in the quarantined eastern province of Dobrogea. All cars, lorries and trains travelling between the region and the rest of the country are being disinfected, while authorities have increased the surveillance of domestic birds in neighbouring areas, said Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur.

The two villages are under even stricter regulations, with police restricting access to and from the villages, where officials in protective suits were disinfecting houses and streets. Authorities have banned farmers from leaving birds and animals outside, for fear they could come in contact with wild migratory birds carrying the virus.

Flutur said tests in areas surrounding Ceamurlia de Jos and Maliuc showed the virus had not spread to other regions and that the tight quarantine measures were working. Tests on 15 swans who died on Friday on the nearby Obretinul Mic lake proved negative for the virus, he said.

Flutur met with his Moldovan counterpart Anatol Gorodenco today and pledged cooperation to stamp out the virus from the region. Moldova and Ukraine neighbour the Danube Delta, a large nature reserve where millions of migratory birds have been arriving from Russia, are believed to have carried the virus.

“This virus has no borders,” Flutur said, adding that countries needed to work together to stop its spread.

The European Union’s top public health official, Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou, sought to calm public fears on Saturday, stressing that no further measures to prevent the disease spreading from Romania and Turkey were immediately needed following EU bans on imports of their poultry last week.

In Turkey, authorities disinfected the quarantined village Kiziksa, 80 miles from Istanbul, and said that while the H5N1 virus detected on a farm there had been contained and would not spread, there were still risks of new outbreaks in other parts of the country.

Experts believe the disease came from wild birds migrating through Turkey from the Ural Mountains in Russia to Africa.

Mustafa Altuntas, the head of an association of Turkish veterinarians, said there was a risk of new outbreaks in other parts of Turkey, especially near wetlands. He said there was also danger of outbreaks in the spring, when the migratory birds begin their journey back from Africa.