INTERVIEW - Italy urges calm on bird flu, orders 36 mln vaccines
By Robin Pomeroy
The Star, 14Jan 2006

ROME (Reuters) - Europe is at no more risk from bird flu than it was before outbreaks which have killed three children in Turkey, Italy's disease prevention chief said on Friday, adding there was no need to impose travel restrictions. 

"Our attention has shifted, but the level of alert hasn't," Donato Greco head of the National Centre for Disease Prevention and Control told Reuters. 

Until last week, all reported human bird flu deaths were in East Asia. With the lethal outbreaks in Turkey, Europe was looking closer to home, Greco said. But as there was still no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus, the risk remained the same. 

Consumer confidence has been worse hit than in most other European countries, with chicken sales halving, despite the fact that the virus can only be caught through close contact with sick animals and not by eating properly cooked meat or eggs. 

With a rubber chicken on his desk - a gift from a well wisher with a sense of humor -   the    official    in    charge    of

preventing an outbreak of the disease said Italians were worrying unnecessarily. 

"I don't want to say avian flu is a normal thing, it's a commercial catastrophe where you have to massacre whole flocks," Greco said. 

"But the risk of importing it and of an epidemic among this country's flocks -- it isn't zero, but it isn't something that should terrify us. Smoking a cigarette is a much greater risk." 

The European Union has already banned poultry imports from Turkey and Italy has advised its citizens traveling there to avoid markets where there are live birds. 

Greco said there was no need for any type of travel restrictions. 

Unless the virus mutates into a form that can be transmitted from one person to another -- which health experts fear could cause a global pandemic -- the greatest risk of it spreading into Europe appears to be from rogue imports or migratory birds, Greco said. 

To insure against any such risks, Italy has ordered 36 million bird flu vaccines, paying 5.4 million euros ($6.51 million) to three firms -- Chiron , Aventis   and Solvay to reserve availability of treatments currently being developed. 

The vaccines themselves would cost an additional 300 million euros, Greco estimated. 

Italy has also ordered that free-range poultry -- estimated at 15-20 percent of the country's total -- are kept under wire screens to reduce contact with wild birds.