Health officials sought to allay fears about a possible spread of the deadly bird flu saying people needed only to follow simple precautions as they announced that the H5N1 strain has been detected in a sixth wild swan in southern Italy.
The Health Ministry said on Sunday that test results came back positive on a swan found in the Puglia region in the heel of Italy. The result came one day after the virus was discovered in five wild swans in southern Italy.
"The important thing is not to touch those animals," Health Minister Francesco Storace said at a news conference hours before releasing the test results on the sixth swan.
The cases in Italy and others confirmed in northern Greece on Saturday marked the first time the highly infectious strain of the H5N1 virus had been detected within the EU.
The Health Ministry repeated on Sunday that the outbreak posed no immediate threat to people nor to domesticated bird flocks because only wild birds had been infected.
Almost all of the 88 human deaths in Asia and Turkey since 2003 have been linked to contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people, possibly sparking a human flu pandemic.
An emergency response committee of veterinary experts and health officials met in Rome to discuss next steps, and the ministry announced the committee's warning not to touch sick or dead birds and seek professional help.
It also reiterated that there was no danger of getting the virus by eating poultry and eggs that had been cooked.
However, the ministry said poultry destined for slaughter in Italy was being checked by veterinarians before and after the birds are killed, and the meat that passes the test is labeled as such.
The swans arrived from the Balkans, likely pushed south by cold weather. They were discovered in the southern Italian regions of Puglia, Calabria and Sicily. Storace said he would travel to those regions in the coming days.
"This is to show that there is no reason for the population to worry," Storace said.
After the virus was confirmed, Italy committed itself to a series of precautionary measures including the creation of a 3km high-risk, protection zone around each outbreak area, and a surveillance zone of an additional 7km.
"We've adopted the first measures, and the protection of the affected area is already under way," the health assessor for Puglia, Alberto Tedesco, told reporters as he arrived for Sunday's meeting at the Health Ministry.
Tests are to be done on samples of domestic birds inside the protection zone. Birds that are infected or suspected of being infected will be killed.
Hunting wild birds will be banned in both zones, and poultry cannot be moved out of the surveillance zone.
The ministry said the same measures were being adopted around the location where the sixth infected swan had been found.
Also on Sunday, an H5 subtype of the bird flu virus was detected in domestic fowl in southeast Romania and in Slovenia, near the border with Austria. Samples have been sent to labs to determine if the viruses are of the H5N1 variety.
The announcement of the case in Slovenia prompted Austria's southernmost province of Carinthia to introduce strict border controls on livestock and food coming from Slovenia.
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