European officials were scrambling yesterday to contain outbreaks of bird flu after cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of the viral disease were for the first time confirmed in EU members Greece and Italy, as well as in Bulgaria.
Italian health officials held a crisis meeting yesterday after the discovery of H5N1 in southern Italy.
The meeting was chaired by Health Minister Francesco Storace and brought together health officials from Puglia, Calabria and Sicily -- the southern regions where the virus was found in migrating swans.
The health official for Puglia, Alberto Tedesco, told the meeting that strict control measures were already in place, ANSA news agency reported.
Another expert attending the meeting, Antonio Limone, said the situation was "under control" in agricultural zones and in the markets.
Storace said on Saturday that the highly pathogenic strain, responsible for the deaths of some 90 people, mainly in Asia, had been found in a total of 21 dead swans, five of them with a virulent form.
The European Commission reacted calmly to the news that the virus had for the first time crossed into the 25-member bloc, after having previously infected birds as close as Romania and killing four people in Turkey.
Storace tried to calm fears by saying that no one had caught the virus directly from wild birds.
But hospitals in Sicily said they would test patients showing flu symptoms to determine the type of infection.
Five chickens found dead near the Sicilian town of Caltanissetta were undergoing tests.
In a bid to calm consumer fears, Italian poultry lobby officials said their "products are undergoing the most severe tests in Europe."
Greek poultry farmers also stressed that bird flu detected near the northern city of Salonika on Saturday among three wild swans "does not concern farm birds."
But authorities and ornithologists fear that more birds may be infected with the lethal avian flu after swans fleeing an exceptionally severe European winter were found dead.
A Greek official on Saturday called on citizens not to panic but to observe simple health precautions.
Yannis Tsougrakis of the Salonika region's Ornithological Union said that the number of swans in the Evros river delta, Greece's largest water body on the northeastern border with Turkey, had risen from 830 in mid-January to 11,000 at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, two Indonesian women have died from the H5N1 bird flu virus, an official confirmed yesterday.
Dewi Sartika, 37, and Kiki Maria, 22, both from Bekasi, a town just east of Jakarta, died on Thursday and Friday at the Sulianti Saroso Hospital, the official said.
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