Europe steps up bird flu protection measures

Europe has accelerated its efforts to combat bird flu as Italy called for EU aid for affected fowl raisers, Germany ordered a limited cull of poultry and France grappled with its first case of the lethal H5N1 strain confirmed in a wild duck.

Veterinarians and soldiers fanned out across the continent yesterday to check dead birds, cordon off affected areas and ensure that vehicles were not carrying fowl. Several countries have ordered all raised fowl kept indoors to avoid contact with migratory birds.

Even as governments sought to reassure the public that eating cooked poultry remained was safe, poultry farmers said consumption has fallen and caused at least hundreds of millions of euros in losses.

“This is a phenomenon that has now clearly taken a European dimension,” said Didier Houssin, a top French Health Ministry official in charge of bird flu tests.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel travelled to the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen yesterday, where authorities ordered a limited cull of poultry to halt the spread of H5N1 from wild birds to farm stocks.

Germany’s Defence Ministry sent 40 soldiers specialised in countering biological and chemical weapons to the island to help disinfect vehicles, equipment and people leaving the affected area.

Officials were still assessing how many of the island’s 400,000 domestic birds would be killed – or when the cull would begin, said Till Backhaus, state agriculture minister for the region.

Italian authorities said yesterday that a wild duck found dead in central Italy and six more wild birds found in Sicily had tested positive for the highly virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu. The new cases brought the total number of birds found in Italy with the deadly virus to 16.

Italian Agriculture Minister Gianni Alemanno, quoted in Il Messagero newspaper yesterday, said he would ask EU officials in Brussels to allow -100 million euros in loans and other guarantees to farmers. He said Italian farmers had lost 300 million euros amid fears of the deadly bird flu strain.

In Romania, where H5N1 was detected in two villages last week, authorities wrapped up a cull of about 22,000 domestic birds in the village of Topraisar. Preliminary tests showed an H5 subtype of the bird flu virus in birds in two more villages near the Black Sea.

Romanian authorities have warned that the country could see human cases of the disease because it has a large number of small household farms in poor rural areas without good sanitation.

Austrian authorities ordered all poultry and fowl kept indoors starting at midnight Saturday after signs that a wild swan found dead in Vienna had been infected with H5N1, health officials said.

France – the EU’s largest poultry producer – became the latest EU country to report H5N1 cases, joining Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovenia. Outside the bloc in Europe, cases have been confirmed in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.

Serbian authorities said veterinary teams would start travelling around the country today to make sure that the farmers were obeying orders to keep the poultry inside.