No country safe from bird flu, say vet chiefs

Veterinary chiefs meeting in Paris today said that no country should consider itself safe from lethal bird flu and that it is “highly likely” that the disease will continue its spread in poultry stocks in Europe and beyond.

“The risk now is high for everybody,” said Bernard Vallat, director of the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health, which hosted the two-day meeting of experts from some 50 countries.

In a closing statement, those attending agreed that “all countries of the world need to control the virus,” and that any country that fails to take proper measures “can seriously endanger the rest of the planet”.

The conference concluded that the lethal H5N1 avian flu virus is “already widespread in several countries of Europe and that the spread of the infection to domestic poultry in other European and neighbouring countries is highly likely,” the statement said.

It added that the risk could be made worse by the spring migration to Europe of possibly infected birds from the Middle East and Africa, where H5N1 has been confirmed in Nigeria, Eygpt and, today, in Niger.

France on Saturday became the first of the European Union’s 25 member states to report H5N1 in commercial poultry, with a farm of 11,000 turkeys affected in the south-east of the country.