Parliamentarians from the 46-member Council of Europe called for international and local measures to halt the spread of the bird flu virus across frontiers.
During an emergency debate they also backed the creation of a solidarity fund, as suggested bu the European Union's commission, to help pay for vaccinations and antiviral drugs in developing countries.
The council's parliamentary assembly also recommended that governments should set aside "substantial" sums of money to indemnify farmers and producers whose flocks were hit by the virus.
It called for "an adequate supply of masks as primary prevention, in particular for farmers and producers living in high risk zones."
The rapporteur on bird flu, Denis Jacquat of France, warned that in countries where agriculture was a major economic activity "farmers hesitate to indicate the existence of the virus, the more so since compensation in the case of the slaughter of poultry is very low."
One major problem was identifying possible outbreaks in small farms run by individuals, whereas monitoring major poultry producers was easy.
The assembly said the criteria for triggering a vaccination of domestic poultry should be very swift and include detection of the highly infectious H5N1 virus, carried by migrating birds.
But it also drew attention to the risk represented by the transport of animals over long distances, migrations and the development of tourism.
The World Health Organisation has warned that a global pandemic could kill between two million and 7.4 million people if the bird flu virus mutates to become highly infectious to humans. Since the end of 2003, 63 people have died from bird flu in Asia.
