EUROPE: Europe stepped up its battle against bird flu yesterday. This was against the backdrop of the EU's top poultry producer - France - grappling with its first reported case of the deadly H5N1 strain in a wild duck, a limited cull of poultry in Germany and 16 H5N1 cases in Italy.
Veterinarians and soldiers fanned out in pockets of the continent to check dead birds, cordon off affected areas and ensure that vehicles were not carrying fowl. Several countries have ordered all reared fowl be kept indoors to avoid contact with migratory birds.
Even as governments sought to reassure the public that eating cooked poultry remained safe, poultry farmers said consumption had fallen and already caused at least hundreds of millions of euro in losses.
"This is a phenomenon that has now clearly taken a European dimension," a top French health ministry official said.
German chancellor Angela Merkel travelled to the Baltic Sea island of Rügen yesterday, where authorities ordered a limited cull of poultry to halt the spread of H5N1 from wild birds to farm stocks.
Germany's defence ministry sent 40 soldiers specialised in countering biological and chemical weapons to the island to help disinfect vehicles, equipment and people leaving the affected area.
Officials were still assessing how many of the island's 400,000 domestic birds would be killed - and when the cull would begin.
Italian authorities said that a wild duck found dead in central Italy and six more wild birds found in Sicily had tested positive for the highly virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu.
The new cases brought the total number of birds found in Italy with the deadly virus to 16.
Italian agriculture minister Gianni Alemanno said he would ask EU officials to allow €100 million in loans and other guarantees to farmers. He said Italian farmers had lost €300 million amid fears of the bird flu strain.
In Romania, where H5N1 was detected in two villages last week, authorities have culled about 22,000 domestic birds.
Bird flu first turned up in Asia, wiping out poultry stocks and killing at least 91 people in Asia and Turkey since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation. Most human cases so far have been linked to contact with infected birds, but experts fear that the virus could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted among humans, sparking a pandemic.
Romanian authorities have warned that the country could see human cases of the disease because it has a large number of small household farms in poor areas without good sanitation.
Austrian authorities ordered all poultry and fowl kept indoors after signs that a wild swan found dead in Vienna had been infected with H5N1, health officials said.
France became the latest EU country to report H5N1 cases, joining Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovenia.
Elsewhere in Europe, cases have been confirmed in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.
Serbian authorities said veterinary teams would start travelling around the country today to ensure farmers were obeying orders to keep the poultry inside.
In France, the agriculture ministry confirmed the first case of H5N1 on Saturday, but insisted that no reared birds had been affected. France went on alert last week to try to ensure that bird flu does not spread from the wild to its 200,000 farms, which raise 900 million birds each year.
All reared fowl have been ordered indoors or vaccinated with early signs that a H5N1 case had been discovered.
But some farmers remained concerned about the ability of governments to face up to nature.
"We are a bit powerless despite all the efforts over the last few years to reach a maximum level in sanitation," said Jean-Michel Lemetayer, head of France's main farmers' union. "What can you do about something that arrives from abroad through wild birds?"
Some farmers in the south-eastern French town of Joyeux, where the infected wild duck was found, began slaughtering their birds as a precaution - and admittedly out of fear.
"I panicked. It hurts because these were pure-bred birds," said Joyeux retiree Gabrielle Josserand (64), after killing her two geese and eight ducks. - (AP)