Europe moves fast on bird flu

As German poultry farmers on the bucolic island of Rügen began killing their stocks over the weekend, European Union officials assured citizens that they are well prepared to handle the bird flu.

"We need to react calmly," said Markos Kyprianou, the EU's health and consumer protection commissioner.

Europeans seem to be heeding his advice so far. The H5N1 virus has been confirmed in wild swans and ducks in Austria, France, and Germany in the past week but it has not jumped to domesticated poultry or humans.

Europe's agricultural officials are learning from Vietnam - which has stopped the avian flu - and their own past brushes with the virus as they take steps ranging from keeping free-range poultry indoors to the immediate culling of poultry stocks, and the creation of buffer zones around affected farms.

"You have to react very promptly and immediately, that is the lesson we've learned from 2003," says Cees Vermeeren of the Brussels-based European poultry lobbying organization AVEC.

Farmers in Germany have already killed 2,500 birds. The culling is intended to avoid the outbreak that gripped Belgium and the Netherlands in 2003, when Dutch officials ordered 30 million birds killed.

But like many European Union initiatives, strategies on the best way to prevent infection among birds differ. France and the Netherlands have asked the European Union to grant them special permission to vaccinate their poultry populations. The EU disapproves of the method. Critics argue that the vaccine keeps the poultry alive, but allows the virus to spread undetected through bird populations.

Dutch officials and experts argue that vaccination is the only way to protect their industry from the financially devastating culls it experienced in 2003. "We know what it is to have avian influenza, we know how difficult it is to eradicate it," says Johan Bongers, a veterinarian at the Central Institute for Animal Disease Control in Lelystad, the Netherlands. "That's why we are in favor of vaccination."

Southeast Asian countries have had success with vaccinations and culling. After suffering the virus's worst human toll - 42 deaths out of 93 confirmed cases worldwide since 2003 - Vietnam has managed to stamp out bird flu in domestic bird populations in the past year. No new cases have been reported since December. Vietnamese officials killed five million birds and vaccinated 242 million in five months in 2005, and another round of vaccinations began last week.

But health officials warn against drawing comparisons between Europe and Vietnam, where humans and poultry, raised in rural backyards, are in far closer contact.

"Certainly the measures that have been taken [in Vietnam] will have contributed to the [improved] situation, but there may be other factors that we're not yet aware of," says Dida Connor, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Hanoi, Vietnam.

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