The European Commission on Saturday confirmed that the H5N1 strain of bird flu was found on a poultry farm in eastern England.
The Commission was informed by British authorities of the suspected outbreak of avian influenza in Suffolk on Friday, the European Union executive said in a statement.
The outbreak occurred on a holding of 159 000 turkeys and was detected following the death of around 2 500 birds. Further tests to characterise the virus are under way to ascertain whether it is the Asian strain.
The British government was enforcing EU-agreed controls to contain the outbreak, which means setting up a protection zone with a radius of 3km and a surveillance zone of 10km around the infected holding, the Commission said.
Strict movement controls are in place, poultry must be kept indoors, there is a prohibition on gatherings of poultry and other birds and on-farm biosecurity measures will be strengthened.
It was the second confirmed case of H5N1 in the 27-country European Union this year, following one in Hungary.
Global pandemic
The strain has killed at least 164 people worldwide since 2003, most of them in Asia, and more than 200-million birds have died from it, or been killed to prevent its spread. Scientists fear it could mutate into a form that can be easily transmitted between humans, and trigger a global pandemic.
Here is a brief chronology of some of the major bird flu developments since last year:
February 8 2006: The first African cases of the deadly H5N1 strain are detected in poultry in the northern Nigerian states of Kano, Kaduna and Plateau.
February 17: Egypt finds its first cases of H5N1 in chickens.
February 18: India announces its first cases of H5N1, finding the virus in poultry in a western state.
February 25: France confirms H5N1 at a farm in the east where thousands of turkeys have died. It is the first case of the virus in domestic farm birds in the EU.
August 8: China says its first H5N1 human case was in 2003, and not in 2005 as it had originally reported.
September 28: China shares long-sought after samples of H5N1 in what many scientists view as a breakthrough in cooperation.
December 8: Foreign donors pledge an additional $476 million for the global fight against the virus at a meeting in Mali.
December 21: South Korea confirms a fourth case of bird flu in poultry. In November, it had confirmed its first case of H5N1 in about three years.
January 9 2007: China says a farmer from the eastern province of Anhui contracted H5N1 in December, the country’s first human case in months. He was released from hospital on Jan. 6.
January 15: Thailand reports its first outbreak of H5N1 in six months in ducks in the northern province of Phitsanulok.
January 16: Japan confirms its first outbreak of H5N1 in three years, in poultry in the southwestern prefecture of Miyazaki. Three further outbreaks in poultry are confirmed by Feb. 3.
January 24: The H5N1 strain is confirmed to have killed thousands of farmed geese in southeastern Hungary. Jan. 29 – WHO confirms another death in Indonesia. The global death toll stands at 164.
January 31: Nigeria says that a woman from the commercial capital Lagos is the first confirmed human victim of bird flu in sub-Saharan Africa. Test samples are being sent to foreign laboratories for further confirmation.
February 3: H5N1 is found to have been responsible for the deaths of 2,500 turkeys on a farm in southeast England — the first outbreak in British poultry. – Reuters 2007