Europe is bracing for its biggest outbreak of bird flu for several years, and the worrying prospect of massive animal culls and fast-rising prices for staple foods including chicken.

The spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, started much earlier this year than in previous years and several countries have already responded by imposing restrictions on how birds and animals must be kept, and with local culls.

The disease, which is mainly spread to farmed birds by migrating wild birds, has caused 56 outbreaks in 10 European Union countries so far this year. Last year, there had been 31 outbreaks in nine countries.

This year's outbreaks have been the most severe in Poland, which is the EU's biggest producer of chicken, but Spain and Germany have also been hard hit.

Governments have also been making contingency plans, in case a full-blown pandemic breaks out and the continent is hit with trade restrictions as a result.

Experts have emphasized that there is very little risk of humans being infected by the flu-like illness and that the threat is mainly economic.

The Reuters news agency said governments are worried about the fact that more European nations have reported outbreaks of bird flu this year than in any previous year in the past decade. Usually, outbreaks start later in the winter and have less time to build into a major pandemic.

Reuters quoted Yann Nedelec, director of French poultry industry group Anvol, as saying: "All these cases in Europe show that the virus is far from gone."

The World Organization for Animal Health said last week Belgium and Slovakia had also reported their first cases of the year.

In response to the spate of outbreaks, Belgium told its farmers last week to keep all poultry indoors, so the chance of farmed birds becoming infected by wild birds is reduced. The Netherlands made a similar decision a week earlier.

France also confirmed its first cases last week and ordered the confinement of all poultry. Last year, the nation did not make such an order until November, and it did not do so in 2023 until December.

France also said last week it had begun vaccinating commercially-reared ducks.

The German news agency DPA said outbreaks in Germany were impacting almost all of the country.

The Friedrich Loeffler Institute, or FLI, which is responsible for monitoring animal health in Germany, said the highly contagious bird flu subtype H5N1 had been found in dead wild birds in all of Germany's 16 federal states.

"We are seeing a very dynamic infection pattern, not only in cranes but also in other bird species," a spokeswoman for the FLI told DPA after conservationists found more than 1,000 dead wild cranes near Berlin that had succumbed to the disease.