York Chow, Hong Kong’s health secretary, said that new laws would be introduced within two weeks to further restrict movement of poultry and farming practices, and to allow the confiscation gf chickens kept in homes.

He said that positive tests for H5N1 in a bird brought in to Hong Kong from China indicated that the virus was endemic. It also raises concerns about detection within China’s Guangdong region, which has not reported any cases of bird flu to date.

The diseased chicken was among four birds that have died with the virus in Hong Kong this year, the region’s first H5N1 cases since 2004. The virus’ presence in the chicken and three wild non-migratory local species prompted experts to suspect that there is a pool of infection, probably in poultry flock, within the region.

Hong Kong was the first place to detect the H5N1 strain, in 1997. While the virus mostly affects birds, it has infected 161 people and killed 86 of them since late 2003, according to the World Health Organisation.

Most victims have been from eastern Asia, but 12 cases and four deaths have been recorded in Turkey.

So far there has been no evidence of person-to-person transmission, and most human cases have involved close contact with infected poultry. But experts fear it is only a matter of time before the virus turns into a form that can transfer between people.

Alerts and measures against a possible pandemic continued today, as Indonesian officials confirmed that a boy aged 15 had died of the disease, the fifteenth death in the country.

The German government ordered that poultry be kept indoors from March 1 for at least two months to protect German flocks against the threat of avian flu from migrating birds.

Markos Kyprianou, the European Union’s Health Commissioner, added that the EU was considering extending measures to keep poultry indoors to areas that have not been considered at high risk for bird flu.

“We have kept up the tight security measures at high risk areas but we are also now considering expanding them beyond these high risk areas due to the spring migratory season,” he said.

The EU is also considering allowing member states to vaccinate poultry flocks, which until now was allowed only in limited circumstances.

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