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The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health warned on Monday that a new bird flu strain has been detected in Europe, UN spokesman Staphane Dujarric told reporters here.
The new bird flu strain "posed a significant threat to the poultry sector, especially in low-resourced countries situated along the Black Sea and East Atlantic migratory routes of wild birds," Dujarric said at a daily news briefing.
"Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have confirmed the new avian influenza virus known as H5N8 on poultry farms, and German authorities have also found the virus in a wild bird," he said.
"H5N8 has so far not been confirmed to infect people," he said. "However, it is highly pathogenic for domestic poultry, causing significant mortality in chickens and turkeys."
Avian influenza, also called avian flu or bird flu, is an illness that usually affects only birds. A new strain jumped to baby seals in 2011. While there have been deaths from certain strains of avian flu, person-to-person infections are rare.
The strain of bird flu found at a British farm in north England has been identified as H5N8, the same as the one recently identified in the Netherlands and Germany, according to the British environment department last week.
The culling of 6,000 ducks at the farm in East Yorkshire, where a case of bird flu was confirmed last Sunday, has already begun, officials said.
On Thursday, bird flu was detected at a poultry farm in Ter Aar in the province of South Holland. The Ministry on Friday said the case was related to the dangerous H5N8 variant. Friday also saw the culling of 43,000 chickens in Ter Aar.
The outbreak of bird flu in the Netherlands began last Saturday in the village of Hekendorp, in the province of Utrecht. All 150, 000 chickens in Hekendorp have since been culled. Enditem
