GREECE: Greece was testing a hunter for avian flu yesterday, as the European Union reacted to its first cases of a disease that has killed about 90 people worldwide and prompted a cull of millions of birds.
A Greek hospital expects to know today whether the 29-year-old man who handled wild ducks is the first human casualty in Europe, after four children died of avian flu in eastern Turkey last month and dozens succumbed in southeast Asia.
With an extremely cold winter being blamed for pushing migratory birds further south than usual, Italy announced a sixth wild swan tested positive for the H5N1 virus, which has also killed birds in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Ukraine.
Bulgaria suspects a dead swan found just 3.2km (two miles) from a farm with 120,000 egg-laying hens also died of H5N1, and warned that a cull may be imminent. "The probability of that is very high and we have to be ready for pictures of veterinarians going into those areas with special suits to cull birds," said Bulgaria's agriculture minister, Nihat Kabil.
Bulgarian police have blocked access to wetlands and begun shooting predators to prevent them spreading the remains of potentially contaminated birds.
In Romania, police rushed to a village in the Danube Delta when locals threatened to raze the house of a man who told the authorities his birds were dying. The H5N1 strain of bird flu has been found in 29 Romanian villages, forcing a huge cull.
The crisis has caused several countries to ban poultry imports from affected states, doing potentially catastrophic damage to often-poor farming communities.
After finding the H5 subtype of bird flu in a swan close to its border with Austria, Slovenia has imposed EU precautionary measures, declaring "high-risk" within a 3km radius of where the swan died. Amid a Europe-wide drop in poultry sales, Croatia and Bosnia have banned imports of live birds and poultry products from Slovenia, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria. Croatia stepped up border controls, and Bosnia ordered poultry be kept indoors.
France has extended its poultry confinement measures, while Germany announced it might bring forward its planned March 1st ban on keeping poultry outdoors.
