WHO braces for bird flu spread in European poultry, urges vigilance

A new kind of bird flu hitting European poultry farms will surely continue to spread among birds, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, urging countries to be "vigilant".

Whether the virus will spread to humans remains unclear, the UN health agency said.

"We should all be quite vigilant," Elizabeth Mumford, a scientist with the WHO's Global Influenza Programme, told reporters in Geneva.

Responding to questions, she said she "absolutely" expected more bird flocks getting sick.

She stressed the importance of culling sick birds and monitoring fever in humans who have been in contact with sick birds to ensure any possible human infections are spotted.

Germany and the Netherlands have been confirmed to be dealing with the same subtype of a highly infectious strain of bird flu, called H5N8, which appears to be similar to a virus that has been infecting birds in China, Japan and South Korea since the beginning of the year, she said.

Britain has also been hit with "a highly pathogenic H5 outbreak also in poultry," Mumford said. It was not yet confirmed, though, that it was the same H5N8 strain.

"It could be something else," she said.

Some 150,000 hens at an egg farm near Utrecht in the Netherlands were set to be culled, while 6,000 ducks on a Yorkshire farm in Britain were also to be put down, authorities said.

WHO said the virus had most likely moved from Asia to Europe with migratory wild birds.

Several hundred thousand birds, mainly ducks, have been culled over the last two months because of a South Korean outbreak.