EU foreign ministers debate bird flu strategy
European Union foreign ministers held emergency talks today on the widening bird flu scare as Greece banned the export of live birds and poultry meat from the area where the EU’s first bird flu case was detected yesterday.
Poultry from Turkey and Romania has already been banned by the EU as bird flu found there was confirmed as being the deadly H5N1 strain. Tests were also being carried out on birds in Bulgaria and Croatia.
The foreign ministers were debating the international response to the westward spread of bird flu and assessed EU nations’ readiness to deal with a possible pandemic.
The H5N1 strain has swept poultry populations in large swathes of Asia since 2003, jumping to humans and killing at least 61 people and resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of birds.
There are concerns that European nations lack stockpiles of vaccines and anti-virals to cope with a major outbreak.
Seeking to calm public fears, the head of the EU’s new agency for disease prevention yesterday downplayed the current risk to humans.
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