New bird flu case in Romania
27/12/2005 17:25  - (SA)  

Bird flu reappears in Romania New bird flu case in Romania Global bird-flu jitters grow Tests confirm deadly flu strain Bird flu horror hits Italy

Bucharest - A village in southeastern Romania was quarantined on Tuesday after five chickens tested positive for an H5 variant of bird flu, said the head of the country's National Animal Health Agency.

The virus was first detected late on Friday in quick tests in Albesti, 100km east of Bucharest, a sign that the virus was turning up west of the Danube Delta, where the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus was first confirmed in October.

Gabriel Predoi of the agency said: "The virus was confirmed in Albesti and the local health authorities will began the isolation of the affected area."

On Friday, the H5 virus was also confirmed in the nearby village of Stelnica.

H5N1 easily transmitted to humans

Samples from the two villages would be sent to Britain for further testing to see if the virus was H5N1, which was being tracked worldwide out of fear that it could mutate into a form that was easily transmitted to humans.

Since 2003, the strain of bird flu had ravaged flocks of birds in Asia and killed at least 71 people there - most of them farm workers in close contact with birds.

Birds in Turkey, Romania, Russia and Croatia recently tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain, but no human cases had been detected in Europe.

So far, Romanian authorities had killed 55 000 domestic birds in areas where the virus had been detected. The culling, compensation and other measures had cost authorities $4.2m.

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