DUTCH poultry farmers complied with a government order to move all their birds indoors yesterday as Europe stepped up its efforts to prevent a potentially deadly bird flu pandemic this winter.

Germany plans to follow suit by ordering that all free-range birds be moved indoors in the middle of next month to prevent contact with birds arriving from the East that may be carrying the virus.

On Thursday experts from the European Union’s 25 member states are to meet in Brussels to co-ordinate contingency plans to combat the threat.

Britain and other EU states are monitoring poultry health closely and stocking vaccines for use in the event of an epidemic.

At the weekend Italy announced stricter import controls, heightened surveillance and accelerated vaccine production.

European worries about bird flu have mounted with evidence that H5N1, the latest strain, found in western China last month, has been moving steadily westwards. It has now reached Siberia and experts are saying that migratory fowl could bring it to Western Europe this autumn.

Discovered in China in 1997, bird flu has infected 112 human beings since 2003, killing 57 in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. So far human beings who contracted the disease got it from handling birds, but the World Health Organisation fears that it might mutate into a human strain that could cause a global pandemic.

The Dutch have taken the most drastic action in Europe so far because the country was badly hit in the previous outbreak in 2003. The European Commission banned the import of live birds and feathers from Russia this month. Yesterday it insisted that its measures so far were adequate.

The Commission said: “We are following the situation closely, but we are not alarmist.” The authorities in Siberia and Kazakhstan ordered the slaughter of thousands of birds during the past two weeks and 142,000 chickens are being monitored as possibly infected on a poultry farm near Omsk, western Siberia.

The Commission said that it had been assured by Russia that reports of an outbreak west of the Urals, near the Caspian Sea, were false.

Experts have been predicting that ducks and other birds will carry the virus southwestwards as they flee the autumn chill, heading across the Black Sea and southern Europe.

Some 850,000 reach Britain later in the autumn every year, including the mallard and pochard ducks that are thought to have brought the disease from Asia to Russia.

While the EU and national officials played down the danger, some experts are talking of potential catastrophe on the scale of the 1919 influenza epidemic if H5N1 changes into a virus that can be transmitted from human being to human being. Tens of millions could die and the world economy could be pushed into its biggest slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s, pessimists say.

The Australian Government has plans to seal off the country from the world, closing air and sea ports, in the event of an Asian bird flu outbreak. Its contingency plan also calls for compulsory quarantine, closing schools, public transport and places of work.

French environmentalists are criticising the Government for complacency. Edir Delhaye, of Cap21, a small environmentalist party, said that France was especially vulnerable because of its large number of free-range poultry farms and the popularity of shooting migratory water birds. He said: “It is vital that we rapidly take measures like the Netherlands and Germany.”

The menace of bird flu could give a much-needed boost to the flagging fortunes of Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, who faces a general election on September 18.

Renate Künast, the Agriculture Minister and a Green Party member, has been campaigning on a safety-first ticket.

“We have to proceed systematically and with an eye on the risks,” she said. The minister sees the biggest risk coming from the illegal animal trade.

The customs service has tightened controls on imported birds. German travellers have been warned against visiting bird markets and any kind of livestock trading centre east of the Urals.

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