The Government today announced a new case of bird flu in turkeys on a farm in Norfolk, where birds had tested positive for the H5 strain of the disease.

It was not yet known, however, whether it is the highly-pathogenic H5NI strain, which has killed more than 200 people worldwide.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said a 3 km (2 mile) protection zone had been set up around a farm in Diss, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, and all birds on the premises would be slaughtered.

A Defra spokeswoman said that there were 5,000 turkeys on the farm, plus 500 geese and 1,000 ducks. "The virus has only been found in turkeys, but other birds on the premises will be slaughtered too," she said.

She would not identify the farm at the centre of the current outbreak, but said that it was not a Bernard Matthews property

It is the first H5 outbreak in Britain since February when an outbreak of H5NI bird flu on a Bernard Matthews plant in in the same area led to the slaughter of almost 160,000 turkeys. No definitive source was found for that outbreak, which matched a strain that had earlier infected geese in southern Hungary.

Britain’s first case of H5NI flu was in a swan in Scotland in 2006. Bird flu has killed or prompted the culling of millions of birds worldwide since late 2003, when it first began ravaging Asian poultry stocks.

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