November 19, 2014

Sweden orders confinement of poultry indoors after bird flu outbreak in Britain

A day after Britain reported an outbreak of bird flu at a duck farm in northern England, Sweden on Tuesday took the precautionary measure of ordering farmers to keep their hens and other poultry indoors.

"We are raising the level of protection as a precaution. It cannot be excluded that the current cases of bird flu were spread by wild birds which means the risk to Swedish poultry is considered higher," Swedish Board of Agriculture spokeswoman Katharina Gielen said in a statement Tuesday, explaining the order.

On Sunday and Monday, the Netherlands and Britain respectively reported outbreaks of the highly infectious H5N8 strain of the avian influenza virus. Earlier on November 4, Germany reported an outbreak of the same strain at a turkey farm. There are fears the outbreaks are linked.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also cautioned Tuesday that the H5N8 bird flu might spread to other European poultry farms, although it remained unclear whether the virus would spread to humans.

"We should all be quite vigilant," Elizabeth Mumford, a scientist working for WHO's Global Influenza Programme, told reporters in Geneva, according to an Agence France-Presse report.

Britain's environment ministry confirmed Tuesday that the strain of bird flu discovered at a duck farm in Yorkshire in northern England is H5N8. It said in a statement that the strain “is a very low risk to human health and no risk to the food chain."

Some 6,000 ducks in the infected farm were culled and a 10-kilometre restriction zone was created around the farm located near Driffield in Yorkshire. Any movement of poultry or products was prohibited within the zone.

In the Netherlands, which is Europe's biggest egg and poultry exporter, authorities imposed a 72-hour ban, on Sunday, November 16, on the transport of poultry, eggs and bird manure, after the discovery of the H5N8 bird flu on a farm in Hekendorp, Utrecht province. Some 150,000 hens were also destroyed to contain the outbreak.

The Netherlands announced Tuesday it had lifted the ban after finding that no other farms in a 10-kilometre restriction zone had tested positive for bird flu.

The WHO said the outbreaks in the three European countries appeared to be similar to a virus that has been infecting birds in China, Japan and South Korea since the start of the year and that it most likely moved from Asia to Europe with migratory wild birds.