Both Romania and Turkey culled birds yesterday to try to halt the spread of bird flu after its outbreak was reported in the two countries.

Romania culled hundreds of birds and quarantined villages yesterday after bird flu was detected in poultry in its Danube delta.

Romanian authorities also banned hunting across the delta, which is home to 14,000 people, sent medical teams to test for possible human cases and vaccinated around half of the delta's population with a regular anti-flu vaccine.

However, Health Minister Eugen Nicolaescu said there had been no cases of flu among the delta's people: "We did not register any cases of (human) flu nor avian in the population."

And Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur told state radio local scientists had so far been unable to isolate the virus in the suspect birds, indicating it was less likely to be a virulent strain, but tests would continue for several days.

If the Romanian cases did turn out to be the deadly H5N1 virus, they would be the first evidence the strain has spread to Europe from Asia, where it has killed 65 people and millions of birds since 2003.

Russia and Kazakhstan have already had outbreaks.

The Danube delta, on the Black Sea, contains Europe's largest wetlands and is a major migratory area for wild birds coming from Russia, Scandinavia, Poland and Germany. The birds mainly move to warmer areas in North Africa including the Nile delta for winter.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate into one which spreads easily among humans, creating a pandemic that might kill millions. The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide.

Yesterday is the third day of testing of Romania's suspect birds. Testing could last up to a week, experts say.

Meanwhile, Turkey culled about 1,500 chickens and turkeys overnight after reporting its first outbreak of the disease on a farm near the Aegean Sea, NTV private television said yesterday.

The authorities have also imposed a three-kilometer quarantine zone around the affected farm, where nearly 2,000 turkeys died of the globally feared disease on Tuesday and Wednesday, the station said.
 
Farm and Health Ministry officials were not immediately available to comment on the reports and it was not clear why the reports of the outbreak only surfaced on Saturday evening.

Veterinary experts are carrying out tests to determine what strain of bird flu has struck in Turkey.
 
The European Commission said yesterday it was following developments in the two countries, and was in close contact with the EU hopefuls and member states.

In another development, a 4-year-old boy has tested positive for bird flu in Indonesia, a case which if confirmed would be the sixth in the world's fourth-most populous country, the health ministry said yesterday.

The boy from Lampung Province on Sumatra was found to be infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza, Director General of Disease Control and Environmental Health I Nyoman Kandun said.
 
(China Daily via agencies October 10, 2005)