AFP Photo A flock of birds are seen flying some 10 kilometers south of Zagreb, Croatia. The European Commission said it will call for a complete ban on wild bird imports after a parrot died in British quarantine with the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu, the first time the virus had struck in Britain.

LUXEMBOURG (AFP) - The European Commission said it will call for a complete ban on wild bird imports after a parrot died in British quarantine with the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu, the first time the virus had struck in Britain.

As the European Union raced to erect barriers against the disease, Russia reported a new case of the lethal avian influenza and Croatia said an as-yet unspecified strain had killed swans in the country's northeast.

The European health commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, said the European Commission -- executive arm of the 25-nation bloc -- would recommend this week a ban on imports of wild birds, apparently bowing to a call from Britain, which holds the rotating EU presidency.

Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of EU farm ministers in Luxembourg, Kyprianou said he would on Tuesday propose a "general ban ... on the imports of captured birds, which is wild birds which have been captured."

On Sunday, British veterinary officials said a parrot imported from Surinam had died from the deadly strain while in mandatory quarantine.

With no cases of H5N1 yet reported in South America, Debby Reynolds, the chief veterinarian for Britain's Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said the working hypothesis was that the parrot caught the virus from birds imported from Taiwan and also in quarantine.

"The closest match is a strain identified in ducks in China earlier this year. It is not so similar to the strains from Romania and Turkey," Reynolds said.

Taiwan, which has not reported any domestic cases of H5N1, although the strain has been seen in birds smuggled in from mainland China, dismissed the British theory, saying there was no evidence to back it up.

"It's very dangerous and irresponsible," Yeh Ying, deputy director of the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, said of the British authorities linking the disease with Taiwan.

The Asian strain of H5N1 avian flu has killed at least 60 people since late 2003.

Though highly infectious among birds, people have generally caught it only after coming into close contact with infected birds.

Health officials warn, however, that the virus could mutate and acquire the capacity to jump from human to human, potentially starting a global flu pandemic capable of killing millions of people, similar to what happened in 1918.

In a worldwide effort to contain the bird flu strain, the United Nations said it was sending an emergency task force of experts to Indonesia, one of the nations worst hit by H5N1, to try to tackle the virus "at source" in poultry.

The Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization was dispatching the team as part of "a new phase of the battle against avian influenza", it said in a statement.

The World Health Organization said Europe was well placed to combat the deadly strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus but warned against complacency.

"It is important not to be complacent in Europe at this time, but ground zero in the war against avian influenza is Asia, not Europe, and Europe has an excellent chance of containing the virus," doctor Gudjon Magnusson, director of the WHO regional office's Europe division of technical support for reducing disease burden, told reporters in Copenhagen.

The highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 bird flu that is circulating in poultry and other birds in southeast Asia has been identified in four countries in WHO's 52-member European region: Britain, Romania, Russia and Turkey.

"Through adequate preparedness and action Europe can avoid the situation we see in Asia," Magnusson said. "Though there are countries in our region that have been affected, the 118 cases of humans diagnosed with the disease so far have all been in southeast Asia, none in Europe."

Russia said a virus discovered at the home of a hunter in the village of Yuzhny, 500 kilometres (300 miles) southeast of Moscow, was confirmed Saturday to be the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain.

A second outbreak was detected in the Siberian village of Pokrovka but the exact strain had yet to be identified.

Croatian authorities said they had detected a second case of bird flu in three days after testing samples from dead swans. But neither of the cases had yet been identified as the specific H5N1 strain.

Elsewhere in Europe, Romanian agriculture minister Gheorghe Flutur announced the lifting of quarantine restrictions for one of two areas in the Danube river delta after no human cases were found.

Across Asia, governments have been rushing to protect their citizens against a possible pandemic.

Thailand has assigned 900,000 volunteers to perform house-to-house checks for signs of the virus, Health Minister Suchai Charoenratanakul said Monday.

Swiss pharmaceuticals manufacturer Roche, which makes the anti-viral drug Tamiflu, believed to be one of the most effective treatments for bird flu, warned Monday it would not be able to meet China's potentially massive demand for the drug should a pandemic erupt.

The company's office in Shanghai told AFP it had informed the Chinese government that it was "highly unlikely" the firm could fulfill major orders for Tamiflu at short notice.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have issued a directive for an all-out effort to prevent the spread of the virus.

Stepped-up veterinary checks have taken place in Beijing after China last week reported its first outbreak of bird flu in more than two months.

This time, a farm in its northern Inner Mongolia region was hit, with 2,600 birds dead and 91,000 others culled.