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EU raises
cash to test bird flu, extends monitoring |
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BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union warned its national governments on Wednesday not to relax their vigilance in the battle against bird flu, ordering them to maintain strict surveillance on wild birds and poultry until the end of 2006. The EU's current monitoring programme, set to expire at the end of this month, requires governments to keep a close watch on migratory routes of birds and areas where wild birds might enter into close contact with domestic birds, such as ponds. |
Meeting in Brussels, the national veterinary experts authorised an extra 2 million euros ($2.42 million) in EU funding for laboratory tests, to cover the rest of 2006. Allocation of the cash by country would be decided after Feb. 7, the deadline for each government to submit its detailed bird flu surveillance programmes to the European Commission. EU funding from the current programme, from July 2005 to the end of January 2006, totalled 884,000 euros ($1.07 million), the Commission said in a statement. |
Since last October, around 25,000 wild birds have been tested for bird flu in the EU's 25 member states. So far, all samples been found to be negative for H5N1, the highly pathogenic strain of the virus that is known to have killed 78 people since late 2003 and is endemic in poultry across parts of Asia. Experts fear the H5N1 strain of bird flu could mutate enough to allow it to pass easily among humans, sparking a pandemic in which millions of people could die. |
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