UK finds bird flu in dead chickens

LONDON - Dead chickens on a farm in eastern England have tested positive for bird flu, the British government has announced.

First tests suggest they had the H7 strain of the disease, and not the H5N1 strain, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement. H5N1 has killed more than 100 people since late 2003, most of them in Asia.

"Further tests are being carried out to determine the strain of the virus and more will be known tomorrow," it said.

Britain said all the birds will be killed at the farm near the market town of Dereham, in the eastern English county of Norfolk, an agricultural center which is home to some of Europe's biggest poultry farms.

Earlier this month, Britain confirmed its first case of H5N1 bird flu in a wild bird when a dead swan was found in eastern Scotland.

An outbreak of the H7N7 bird flu strain in the Netherlands in 2003 led to the culling of 30 million birds, over a third of all Dutch poultry at a cost of hundreds of millions of euros.

Scientists fear bird flu could become highly dangerous to humans if the virus mutates into a form easily passed on from one person to another.

Both highly pathogenic and low pathogenic avian influenzas can infect humans but rarely do so. H5N1 is the bird flu strain which poses the biggest threat to public health although cases of human infection remain relatively infrequent.

- REUTERS