The European Union was awaiting test results on Saturday that should show whether a lethal strain of bird flu that has killed more than 60 people in Asia has reached Europe.
Bird flu has been detected in two Romanian villages and the tests will prove whether this is the H5N1 strain, which is potentially fatal to humans. The deadly strain has been detected in Turkey.
EU officials say they have been working on the assumption that the lethal H5N1 strain will be found in Romania, and if confirmed it would be the deadly virus’s first arrival in mainland Europe.
The Romanian results, provided by an EU laboratory in Britain, are due to be released by the European Commission in Brussels as the 25-nation EU bolsters its defences against the growing bird-flu threat.
On Friday, EU veterinary experts approved a package of measures, including advising that some poultry be moved indoors, as well as calling for early-warning systems to be set up near high-risk areas such as wetlands.
But the experts, in a statement released after two days of talks on the threatened crisis, underlined that for the moment the outbreaks in Turkey and Romania pose no risk to public health.
“Information from the outbreaks of avian influenza this week in East Europe [Romania and Turkey] suggests that the disease remains confined to poultry and wild birds and at this stage no human cases have been confirmed,” they said.
“Therefore, at present avian influenza does not represent a risk to the general public,” they added.
The European Commission has said it expects the Romanian results possibly on Saturday afternoon. They were initially due on Friday, but were delayed by a day because of customs problems handling the “dangerous” samples from Bucharest.
The commission, the EU’s executive branch, on Thursday called on EU governments to stockpile anti-viral drugs, and said people at risk should ensure they are vaccinated against regular influenza.
While avian influenza primarily affects birds, the H5N1 strain has killed more than 60 people in South-East Asia since 2003.
The big fear among experts is that H5N1 may mutate, acquiring genes from the human influenza virus that would make it highly infectious as well as lethal — possibly killing millions worldwide as the influenza pandemic of 1918 did.
In Geneva, the World Health Organisation said on Friday that it is concerned about the new outbreaks — but sought to allay panic.
“The spread of H5N1 to poultry in new areas is of concern as it increases opportunities for further human cases to occur,” it said, while stressing that the H5N1 virus “does not spread easily from birds to humans”.
In a further worrying sign, a new study said researchers have identified a mutated form of H5N1 bird flu that is resistant to Tamiflu, the drug being stockpiled around the world to counter a feared influenza pandemic.
At the centre of the crisis in Turkey, the environment ministry on Friday banned the hunting of wild birds — but officials remained confident the disease had been successfully contained.
“It looks like it is dying out,” ministry spokesperson Faruk Demirel said.
In Romania, veterinary teams accompanied by police sped up the slaughter of poultry in a 3km zone around the backyard farm in the Danube delta where a bird virus had been found.
On Friday, Bucharest said the virus was detected in a second village nearby, in samples taken from a goose and a chicken.
“The village was immediately placed in quarantine and all the poultry will be sacrificed,” a spokesperson said.
The European Commission slapped on a ban on live bird imports on Turkey on Monday even before confirming the presence of HN51. It took a similar step on Thursday against Romania after an undetermined strain of bird flu was confirmed. — AFP