Bird flu fears heading west

but nobody took any notice, because this was also the day J.F. Kennedy was shot dead. Similarly, the biggest influenza pandemic of the 20th century killed 20 million people in 1918/19, but did not make the top headlines, because there was a World War going on at the same time. To this day, the disease wrongly labelled the Spanish flu has remained a footnote in the history books. Recently, however, people have been paying somewhat more attention to it. Today, we know that flu epidemics do not come from Spain, but that they arise when avian flu viruses cross the species barrier and by mutation acquire the ability not only to infect humans but also to transmit the infection directly from one person to another. The most likely breeding place for new viruses of this kind is South East Asia, where millions of domestic birds and many millions of people live in close proximity. In recent years, with human and bird populations continuing to rise, this problem has become more urgent. Since December 2003, a number of regional outbreaks of the avian flu strain H5N1 in South East Asia have caused serious economic damage and led to over 100 confirmed cases of human infection, resulting in over 50 deaths. Earlier this year, the discovery of infected wild birds in Russia, Kazakhstan and possibly Finland suggested that the autumn migrations might spread the virus to Europe. In this context, the European Union and its member states are faced with two important tasks: containing the spread of influenza in birds to avoid economic damage to the poultry industry, and even more importantly, making viable plans for the day when bird flu turns into a human flu pandemic. In order to protect the free range chickens on European farms, one has to keep an eye on the wildfowl. Many variants of influenza virus are known to be less dangerous to wild waterfowl than to farmyard turkeys and chickens. If this holds for the variant H5N1, which caused the recent flu outbreaks in Asia, wild animals could spread it to Europe without suffering too much from it themselves. Following reports of a potential case of avian flu in a seagull in Finland, the Dutch agriculture minister ordered all free-range chickens to be kept indoors until further notice. However, other EU member states have not followed this stance, as the EU still — in statements …