Bird flu on a European tour

Jul 8 2007

German officials have culled as many as 1,000 domestic birds following the discovery of the deadly H5N1 bird-flu virus in a dead goose in the village of Wickersdorf in eastern Germany.

The cull includes nine villages and is part of a quarantine process encompassing a 13-kilometre radius of the initial bird flu site.

The infection in the domestic goose is the second time H5N1 has been found in German poultry; last year near the city of Leipzig another case led to a cull of 22,000 farm birds.

Health officials have accused residents in the area of keeping hundreds of birds in defiance of laws, which has meant authorities have been forced to carry out house to house searches.

The deception came to light when a local register of poultry showed only 35 birds were officially kept in and near Wickersdorf.

Animal-protection groups have denounced the cull as unnecessary but officials say tissue samples will be taken from all the culled birds and sent to animal-health laboratories for testing.

Meanwhile French authorities have confirmed that the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed three swans in eastern France.

This is the country's first outbreak of the disease in more than a year and France's Ministry of Agriculture has raised the threat level from the disease from "moderate" to "high" following the test results.

Authorities have stressed the importance of protecting domestic fowl and poultry in mainland France from the virus and from contact with wild birds.

They have placed a one-kilometer quarantine around the pond at Assenoncourt in the Moselle region, where the three swans died and increased surveillance after the outbreaks in Germany and the Czech Republic last month.

According to the World Health Organisation, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has to date killed at least 191 people since 1993, with most of the deaths in Indonesia.

While the virus remains essentially a disease of birds and only contracted by close contact with a diseased bird, experts fear it will mutate into a form which can transfer between humans, raising the likelihood of a pandemic with the potential to kill millions.