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)
