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Bird flu tightens hold on Europe
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-02-17 10:26
Bird flu took a firm hold on Europe on Thursday, moving officially into
Slovenia, and putting countries in the Middle East and Africa on alert.
While swans were the sentinels, their limp bodies a dramatic testament to the
spread of the virus, experts said other birds were almost certainly carrying
H5N1 influenza to poultry.
A chicken is pictured inside a chicken farm in
Kranenburg, about 60km (37 miles) north of Duesseldorf February 16, 2006.
[Reuters] |
Germany discovered 10 more H5N1 cases, Greece detected an additional two and
Austria also reported one more.
"Of course we are worried and we have to get used to the fact that avian flu
is now spreading within the European Union," Zsuzsanna Jakab, head of the EU's
Stockholm-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, told Reuters
television.
Hungary was awaiting results from a specialist laboratory in Britain to
determine whether the H5 virus detected in three dead wild swans on Wednesday
was the H5N1 strain.
"Even with the most rigorous action we cannot assume that we will overcome
this matter in a few weeks," German Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer said in
a televised speech.
Iraq declared a bird flu alert in a province south of the capital Baghdad to
prevent people from transporting birds in and out of the area, Al Arabiya
television reported .
The virus killed an Iraqi teenage girl in January.
H5N1 influenza remains mainly a disease of poultry, and has killed or forced
the culling of more than 200 million birds across Asia, parts of the Middle
East, Europe and Africa.
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