The European Union urged member states to step up preparations for a bird flu pandemic today after British scientists said that a deadly strain of the virus had spread to the edge of Europe.

A laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey, has confirmed that a sample isolated from dead birds at a Turkish poultry farm was the lethal H5N1 strain that has killed 60 people in South-East Asia.

"We have received now confirmation that the virus found in Turkey is avian flu H5N1 high pathogenic virus," said Markos Kyprianou, the EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner. "It's true that scientists caution us and warn us that there will be a pandemic".

Mr Kyrpianou said that test results on the Turkish strain indicated "a direct relationship with viruses recently found in Russia, Mongolia, and China".

He then recommended "the increase of vaccination among the risk population for the seasonal flu in any event, not at least because this is part of our preparedness plan to deal with the potential or possible pandemic".

Since only 300 million doses of flu vaccine are produced ever year, there would soon be a shortage if the EU dramatically increased the number of its own citizens who receive seasonal flu jabs.

Although scientists believe that regular flu vaccines are unlikely to protect against bird flu, it is feared that the virus could mutate into a human pandemic strain if people already suffering from normal human flu are then infected with the H5N1 strain.

The two viruses could get into the same cell and swap genes to produce a dangerous hybrid that sparks a global human epidemic.

Those considered most vulnerable to influenza are the over-65 population, young children, and those with weakened immune systems or chronic respiratory conditions.

The Department of Health said that having a seasonal flu jab would not offer protection against bird flu. "The Department of Health advises that people get a seasonal flu vaccination, but no-one is saying that that would offer any protection against the H5N1 virus, or any mutated strain of it," a spokeswoman said.

"Avian flu isn't really a public health issue in those terms at the moment. We have a whole heap of plans in place if it does mutate into a pandemic strain," she added.

The spokeswoman admitted, however, that only 2.5 million of the 14 million courses of Tamiflu ordered by the Government have so far been delivered, and the full amount is not expected until the end of 2006. Tamiflu is an anti-viral drug that can lessen the effects of flu.

The European Commission banned live bird imports from Turkey on Monday after the bird flu outbreak there, and took a similar measure today against Romania.

The commission is working on the assumption that an outbreak in Romania, among ducks on the Danube delta, is also of the H5N1 virus, although Romanian officials have disputed that.

Mr Kyprianou warned people travelling to countries where the disease has been diagnosed to avoid "going to farms, coming in contact with wild birds and so on".

Public health experts from the 25 EU member states are to meet in Brussels this afternoon to discuss the next steps in the battle to prevent the spread of avian flu.

These could include strengthening "bio-security" in EU poultry farms. This might lead to free-range birds being brought inside to avoid transmission of the virus, although farmers have not yet been told to do so.

The H5N1 bird flu strain does not easily infect humans, but 117 people, mostly poultry workers, have caught it over the last two years in Asia and at least 60 of them have died.

Scientists are tracking the spread of the virus in birds because of the risk that it could mutate into a human strain as dangerous as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed 50 million people around the globe.

The outbreak in Turkey occurred in an outdoor turkey farm with 1,800 birds, 1,700 of which died after the first clinical signs were detected in early October. All the remaining birds on the farm in Balikesir, in the north-western part of Anatolia, have been killed and all carcasses destroyed.

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