Poland confirmed its first cases of deadly H5N1 bird flu yesterday, as a United Nations official accused wealthy western countries of doing too little to fight the disease.
"It was the H5N1 strain. It's certain," said Jan Zmudzinski of the Polish Veterinary Institute, after receiving results of tests on two dead swans found in Torun, a city on the Vistula river, downstream from the capital, Warsaw.
Polish officials placed restrictions on poultry farms around the city after their country became the latest European Union member to be hit by H5N1, which has killed more than 90 people in southeast Asia, Iraq and Turkey.
Agriculture ministers from Turkey and four other Black Sea states met yesterday to co-ordinate a response to the virus, which experts think could mutate into a powerful strain of flu that passes easily between humans and spreads around the world.
That worry has been heightened by the death from bird flu of a Chinese man who was not believed to have had contact with poultry, and who lived in an area that had not registered any cases of the disease.
France found the virus in another duck yesterday, amid complaints that it was costing the poultry industry €40 million a month in lost sales.
Sweden also confirmed new cases of the disease, while Serbia said it was almost certain that H5N1 had reached there.
The World Health Organisation's Dr Margaret Chan said the cost to agriculture had exceeded $10 billion (€8.3 billion) and that the livelihood of around 300 million farmers had been affected.
Jacques Diouf, the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Agency, said yesterday that rich nations had been slow to respond when the outbreak began in December 2003. "Developed countries thought this was going on in Asia, that it was far away and that we were exaggerating the risks of the epidemic," he told France's Libération newspaper, adding that they "only began to respond when the flu reached Turkey" last year.
