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Lethal bird flu spread westwards across Europe, with experts fearing a spring epidemic among poultry as wild migrating birds return from Africa.

In Africa itself, where illegal poultry trade was also blamed in part for spreading the virus, there were fears bird flu had crossed Nigeria to Niger.

The latest apparent outbreaks of the H5N1 virus, which can be fatal in humans, were announced in Austria and Germany.

Both countries said preliminary tests on dead wild swans suggested they had been infected by the disease but both were awaiting confirmation of the test results.

"On Thursday we will have confirmation from the laboratory but the experts who I've spoken to personally and who did the tests indicated that it's very probably this very dangerous virus," German Consumer Protection Minister Horst Seehofer told public television ARD.

If the virus is confirmed by the European Union laboratory in England, Austria and Germany will join Italy and Greece as the first EU countries with H5N1 outbreaks, all involving wild swans.

The H5N1 strain has also been detected in wild birds and poultry in Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Croatia. No human cases have been reported so far in Europe.

Romania, which first detected H5N1 last October, said on Tuesday the virus had re-emerged in dead poultry in the southeastern village of Topraisar.

Slovenia on Tuesday reported six fresh cases of the H5 family of bird flu viruses but was awaiting laboratory tests to see the samples were of the pathogenic H5N1 variety.

Experts said it was only a matter of time before bird flu erupted in Europe, the word's biggest poultry producer after Brazil and the United States.

"We have absolutely no control over the introduction of the virus by migratory birds that are about to start returning from Africa to Siberia, Scandinavia and Greenland. It is unavoidable," French food safety agency panelist Jean Hars told AFP.

"Six months ago, we alerted the international community to the risk of bird flu reaching Africa," said United Nations Food and Agriculture official Samuel Jutzi in Rome. "Now we have to say that there is a risk for Europe in the spring."

But conservation group Birdlife International disputed that wild birds were solely to blame. It pointed out that Africa's first outbreak of bird flu, in Nigeria, was probably due to illegal imports of poultry from China, Turkey, Europe and Latin America.

"Globalisation has turned the chicken into the world's number one migratory bird species," said Birdlife's science director Leon Bennun in a statement.

On Wednesday veterinary experts from the EU's 25 member states will meet in Brussels to evaluate the threat and plan for possible mass poultry culls.

A suspected case of human H5N1 infection in Greece turned out to be a false alarm on Tuesday, when test results from a duck hunter who complained of flu-like symptoms after handling wild ducks came back negative.

Since 2003, at least 90 people, mostly in China and southeast Asia but also in Turkey and Iraq, have been killed by H5N1.

So far the world's 160-odd human cases of H5N1 infection have involved people living close to infected birds. But doctors fear the virus is close to mutating into a form transmissible between humans that could kill millions.

In Nigeria, scientists were examining blood samples from farm workers as foreign experts arrived to help protect Africa from its possible first human cases.

Since Nigeria last week announced Africa's first outbreak of H5N1, veterinary scientists have confirmed its presence in flocks in three states and suspect it has infected birds in five more, an area of 280,000 square kilometer (108,000 square miles).

Officials have also expressed fear that it could spread southwest to the densely populated area around Lagos. Africa's biggest city is home to at least 16 million people, many of whom keep chickens in their back yards.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday raised fears that bird flu might already have reached neighboring Niger.

Keen to get ahead of the game, tiny Guinea-Bissau and the massive, war-shattered Democratic Republic of Congo announced they had set up official crisis teams to confront the menace.

As sightings of the virus crept across Europe, authorities in France, Germany, Belgium and the Czech Republic ordered poultry producers to lock up their birds.

The Italian Farmers' Confederation said plummeting sales of poultry and eggs would cost the industry "at least € 1 billion " or a quarter of its turnover.

(Chinadaily.com via agencies February 15, 2006)