IF GOVERNMENT scientists confirm today that the swan discovered on the Scottish coast died of H5N1, Britain will be the latest in a string of European countries to report the disease in recent weeks.

The arrival of bird flu in Europe has prompted panic among poultry farmers. The consumer reaction has been equally fraught.

In Italy chicken sales plummeted by 80 per cent. In France the decline was 40 per cent. In Germany, even before yesterday’s announcement that the disease had entered the country’s domestic fowl population, sales had slumped by 30 per cent.

The German outbreak, at a large poultry farm, is the second instance of H5N1 in domestic fowl in the European Union after an outbreak in France in late February.

Culling on the farm, which houses more than 16,000 turkey, geese and chickens, began last night.

“This is the first case of H5N1 in domestic fowl [in Germany] and this makes it somewhat explosive,” Helma Orosz, the Minister of Social Affairs for Saxony, said. “Tonight we will start to kill all the birds [at the farm].”

A suspected outbreak of H5N1 at a farm in Sweden remained unconfirmed last night.

The European Commission has issued guidelines for management of exclusion zones after outbreaks. Poultry must be kept indoors, movement of poultry is banned except directly to the slaughterhouse and movement of meat outside the zone is highly restricted.

Hunting of wild birds is banned and the Commission says that poultry owners and their families should be given disease awareness training.

Countries have differed on whether to vaccinate poultry flocks, however.

The Netherlands launched preventative vaccination on March 16 for its backyard poultry population of between one and three million, plus about five million free-range birds. France also moved to vaccinate its domestic flock. Thirty-two cases of the disease have been found in wild birds in Switzerland. Greece has confirmed 32 cases in swans and geese. Since February, 274 wild birds have been infected with the disease in seven of Germany’s states.

In Britain, vaccination is not the preferred response to an outbreak — experts in any case doubt that there are sufficient supplies of the vaccine.

British consumers are not expected to panic, however. Spring is a slow period for poultry sales but it is believed that the British have been inured by outbreaks in livestock such as BSE and foot-and-mouth disease to react to such situations more calmly.

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