The dreaded A(H5N1) bird flu virus has been detected in wild birds in Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, European officials announced Saturday, the first time its presence has been detected in the European Union.
“The bird flu virus has arrived in Italy,” Francesco Storace, the Italian health minister, said at a news conference, announcing that 17 swans had been found dead in three southern regions, Calabria, Sicily, and Puglia. Testing determined the cause to be the A(H5N1) virus, he said.
The announcement came a day after the opening of the Olympic Winter Games in Turin, several hundred miles to the north. Officials said the virus affected wild birds and posed no immediate risk to people.
In Greece, health officials announced that a European Union lab in Weybridge, England, had determined that three swans in the northern part of the country tested positive for the virus, which has infected at least 166 people and killed 88, mostly in Asia. Hours later, EU officials announced that some swans in Bulgaria, near the Danube Delta, had tested positive as well.
No human infections were reported in the three countries, but the outbreak raised concerns that the spread of the disease could increase chances for it to mutate into a form easily transmissible among humans, who generally catch the disease from domestic poultry.
The arrival of bird flu in the European Union had been predicted for some months as the virus marched steadily from China to Russia, to the Balkans and, in the past week, to West Africa. It is being carried by migrating birds, so all countries on their flight paths are vulnerable.
“In some ways, we would have expected it earlier in Italy,” said Dr. Juan Lubroth, a senior veterinarian at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
Also Saturday, authorities in Nigeria said they were investigating whether the deadly strain discovered in the country last week had spread to humans after two children became ill.
“We have got bird flu now in southeast Asia, central Asia, Eastern Europe, and West Africa,” Dr. David Nabarro, the U.N.’s chief bird flu expert, said before the latest announcements. “Compared with eight months ago, this is a major extension of the avian influenza epidemic.”
The Italian outbreak seems to have been a model of early detection, underlining how bird flu can be controlled in countries that have the money and scientific resources. Recent outbreaks in poor countries such as Nigeria, Turkey and Iraq have percolated for months before they were discovered, allowing the virus to spread widely to commercial chicken flocks and to humans.
In Italy, police officers near Messina, in Sicily, found two dead swans Thursday and performed rapid screening tests on them in the wild, which suggested that the swans had a flu virus, according to ANSA, the official Italian news agency.
Such simple tests are not specific enough to indicate a particular virus or strain. The carcasses were sent to a veterinary institute in Palermo, which sent samples to a lab in Padua that confirmed the positive test results.
In the wake of the tests, Storace, Italy’s health minister, prohibited all movement and transport of live animals in the affected regions as a precaution, and a truckload of pigeons from Malta was turned back Saturday.
There are no signs of infection in commercial poultry, he said, but farms were being inspected.
“There is no immediate danger for our country because our system of surveillance is efficient and (the virus) has not contaminated bird farms,” Mauro Delogu, a prominent virologist at the University of Bolgona, told ANSA.
Again and again, dead swans have become an important first marker indicating the presence of bird flu in a region. This is because they are very susceptible to the virus and because they are so large, so people notice when they die, the U.N.’s Lubroth said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.