Europe on high alert over avian flu

Europe was on high alert yesterday over a possible bird flu epidemic after fears of an outbreak of the disease in Romania and Turkey. Authorities in Germany said that they were preparing emergency measures to stop the disease from spreading, following its apparent arrival from Asia at the borders of the EU.

In Romania, officials began culling hundreds of birds in the Danube delta and sealed off villages. They also vaccinated half of the delta's population with an anti-flu vaccine in an attempt to stop the disease spreading from birds to humans.

In Turkey, the authorities began slaughtering poultry at farms near a western village as a precaution, a day after the agriculture minister confirmed the country's first bird flu case at a turkey farm in the region, news reports said. Military police set up roadblocks at the entrance to a village near Balikesir, western Turkey. A two-mile radius around the village was quarantined, Associated Press reported.

Romania's attempt to contain the disease comes after several cases of bird flu were found there on Friday. Yesterday experts were trying to establish whether the virus that had killed the birds was the deadly H5N1 strain, or a less virulent type.

However, Debby Reynolds, the British government's chief veterinary officer, said: "The Romanian authorities told us today that initial tests for avian influenza viruses are negative. This must be confirmed by further tests which will take several days."

Residents in the Black Sea region - which is home to migratory birds from across Russia and northern Europe - noticed that over the past few weeks, chickens, ducks and geese were dying. They also reported seeing swans floating dead in the water.

Experts are now trying to ascertain whether the Romanian cases are directly linked to the bird flu pandemic in Asia, which since 2003 has killed 65 people and millions of birds. The disease has already spread to Russia and Kazakhstan.

Yesterday Romanian officials urged caution. There was no evidence so far that the disease had been transmitted from birds to humans, the health minister, Eugen Nicolaescu, said. "We did not register any cases of [human] flu nor avian in the population," he said.

But authorities across the EU were yesterday preparing for a worst-case scenario: that the H5N1 virus could mutate into one that spreads easily among humans, creating a catastrophic pandemic. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed between 20 and 40 million people.

Germany already has plans to issue an order that all domestic fowl should be moved indoors if necessary - ending free-range farming there. "The risk to Europe and Germany itself is difficult to establish," an agricultural ministry official said.

In Turkey, the authorities quarantined a turkey farm near the Aegean Sea after 2,000 birds died there last week. The farm's owner, Mehmet Eksen, yesterday told the Hurriyet newspaper he now feared for his own health, adding: "I cannot go near my wife and children."

Turkish officials, however, said that the danger was minimal and urged calm.