Britain gassed tens of thousands of turkeys and extended restrictions on the movement of poultry to try to prevent the spread of deadly bird flu from a farm in eastern Britain.
United Nations officials said they were not surprised by the outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza and said they have been expecting the virus to spread during the colder winter months, much as it did last year.
Britain’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or Defra issued a statement on Sunday saying it appeared the virus had been confined to the Bernard Matthews farm near the town of Lowestoft.
More than 150 000 turkeys were slaughtered at the farm starting on Saturday.
Dr David Nabarro, the United Nations bird flu envoy, said Europe should be ready for more outbreaks.
”It’s a cause for concern but at the same time because the response is right I think the concern should be quite limited,” Nabarro said in an interview in Jakarta.
He said the fowl were likely to have been infected by wild birds, which can carry the virus without becoming sick.
”It’s incredibly difficult to completely insulate a bird farm from wild birds in the vicinity,” Nabarro said.
Britain said the virus was the same pathogenic Asian strain found last month in Hungary, where an outbreak among geese on a farm prompted the slaughter of thousands of birds.
The H5N1 virus remains primarily a disease of birds. It has killed or forced the slaughter of more than 200-million birds globally since 2003.
But it does occasionally infect people. There have been 271 confirmed bird flu cases in humans worldwide and 165 deaths since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation.
Nabarro said the latest death, that of a 22-year-old Nigerian woman who was the first known human fatality from the H5N1 virus in sub-Saharan Africa, was no surprise.
Widespread circulation
”We have been expecting that there may well be human cases in Nigeria because the amount of virus circulating in the poultry population is really very large,” he said.
The government had responded ”energetically”, he said, but had not been able to bring the infection in the poultry under control.
The virus has spread to 17 of Nigeria’s 36 states over the past year despite culling, quarantine and bans on transporting live poultry.
The fear is that the virus will change into a form that one person could catch easily from another. At that stage H5N1 could spread quickly around the world in a pandemic.
Countries have been rehearsing for just such a scenario.
Flu expert Dr Robert Webster of St Jude Children’s Medical Centre in Memphis, Tennessee, said the virus is continuously evolving.
”This is the greatest concern of mine at the moment, the resurgence of these viruses in Japan, South Korea and Thailand where they had aggressively stamped out the virus, and the virus has come back in,” he told a news conference on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia.
”It would suggest that migratory birds have probably brought this virus back in.”
Japan has had four outbreaks of the H5N1 virus at poultry farms this year.
Webster, speaking before news of the outbreak in Britain, said turkeys are particularly vulnerable because stocks are so inbred, meaning they are all genetically similar.
The more the virus circulates, the more chances it has to evolve into something dangerous to people, Webster said.
”It goes into a huge range of different avian species and it also can go into a wide range of mammalian species and not only go into those species, but return from the domestic and mammalian species to the wild bird species,” Webster said. – Reuters