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 Health officials said the outbreak may have been brought to Europe
by wild birds migrating from Asia where millions of South Korean
farm birds have had to be destroyed.
"A species of wild swans might be carrying the virus without showing
signs of disease," said the European Commission after adopting
emergency measures to contain the outbreak that mirrored those
already taken by Britain and the Netherlands.
A spokeswoman at Britain's Department for Environmental, Food and
Rural Affairs said the public health risk was very low and there was
no risk to the food chain.
Bird flu was also found on farms in Germany earlier this month.
Authorities have yet to determine conclusively whether there is a
link between the German, Dutch and British outbreaks, or whether
they are related to outbreaks in Asia, but suspect that all are
linked.
The German and Dutch outbreaks are of the H5N8 strain, which is
highly contagious in birds. H5N8 has never been found in humans,
unlike H5N1, which has killed 400 people mostly in Asia and the
Middle East since 2003 and caused a global scare.
British authorities said the flu found there was also not H5N1,
although they had not yet determined whether it was H5N8. The
European Commission said later it probably was H5N8.
The measures being taken "have been effective in the past to contain
outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza", said Linda
Klavinskis, a specialist in immunobiology at King's College London.
"The risk for humans is always a possibility because of the massive
shedding of these viruses by infected chicken flocks. However, in my
opinion, the chances are very low," she said.
Deadly H5N1 is still found in a handful of countries after a global
outbreak that peaked in 2005-2009. On Monday, the Egyptian health
ministry said a 19-year-old woman had died of it, the second person
known to have died of the disease this year in the country.
In Britain, authorities imposed a restricted zone for 10 km (six
miles) around the farm in Yorkshire where bird flu was found and
announced all 6,000 ducks there would be destroyed.
In the Netherlands, 150,000 chickens were to be destroyed. The
discovery near the village of Hekendorp triggered a three-day ban on
shipments of all poultry products out of the country, the world's
largest egg exporter. A 10-km exclusion radius imposed around the
infected farm will be sealed for 30 days.
The European Union hailed the Dutch and British responses. "We can
say that all the protocols were followed and we can only praise the
behaviour of the authorities of the two member states," said a
European Commission spokesman.
The Dutch government said on Monday that two nearby farms were found
to be free of infection.
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The Netherlands, with a population of less than 17 million, is the
world's second largest exporter of agricultural products after the
United States, selling $79 billion euros ($99 billion) of
agricultural goods abroad last year. The 700 Dutch poultry farms
house 98 million chickens and export 6 billion eggs a year.
All 300 petting zoos in the Netherlands were also closed until
Wednesday. "People can spread this flu as well as animals," said the
Association of Petting Zoos. "People can't infect other people, but
they can infect chickens."
MIGRATING BIRDS SUSPECTED
The H5N8 strain of bird flu was reported in Germany on Nov. 4 on a
farm in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The Dutch
hens began to show symptoms of H5N8 on Friday and blood tests
confirmed the infection on Saturday.
European officials said past outbreaks on the continent had always
been brought by migrating birds.
"It is hard to protect farms from wild birds. They are often
attracted by food and other birds," the Director General of the
World Organisation for Animal Health, Bernard Vallat, told Reuters
in an interview.
Elke Reinking, spokeswoman for Germany's state animal disease
institute, said links between the type found in Germany and the
Netherlands and the one in South Korea were suspected but there was
still "no conclusive evidence".
Even short-term restrictions on trade could hit the Dutch
agricultural export businesses, with the export of eggs alone worth
around 3.2 million euros a day. Between 2003 and 2006, around 30
million hens were culled in the Netherlands after an outbreak of
another bird flu strain, H5N7.
(Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti and Jan Strupczewski in
Brussels, Thomas Escritt in Amsterdam, Hans-Edzard Busemann in
Berlin and Kate Kelland in London; writing by Peter Graff; editing
by Giles Elgood, David Stamp and Philippa Fletcher)
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