Europe threw up protective zones to keep the ever-expanding bird flu from spreading to humans and devastating the continent's poultry industry, even as researchers warned a future pandemic could kill 142 million people worldwide. Romania was deemed particularly at risk of human infection, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced Friday. With bird flu reported at 31 separate sites, "Romania runs the risk of human contamination at any moment," WHO expert Guenael Rodier said at the end of a four-day inspection tour.
Officials in Asia and Africa, meanwhile, announced further measures to stem the relentless avian spread of the H5N1 virus, which has killed 91 people since 2003, all but a handful in China and Southeast Asia.
France joined a growing list of European nations with confirmed or suspected bird flu cases when two dead ducks were discovered in a wildlife reserve north of Paris. Tests results showing whether the birds carried the H5N1 strain were expected later Friday.
A fresh avian outbreak was also reported at a poultry farm in the southern Russian province of Dagestan, the second such case in the region this week.
To date, only persons coming into regular contact with infected farm fowl -- mainly chickens -- have contracted the disease, which has proven fatal in half the cases recorded.
But should the virus mutate into a form communicable between humans, as has happened in major flu outbreaks in the past, the consequences could be catastrophic, top experts concluded in a study released this week in Australia.
A global bird flu pandemic could kill as many as 142 million people and wipe out some 4.4 trillion US dollars of economic output, according to a worst-case scenario published by the Lowy Institute, an Australian independent policy think tank.
"The mild scenario is estimated to cost the world 1.4 million lives and close to 0.8 percent of GDP (more than 300 billion US dollars) in lost economic output," say the authors, economic modeller and Reserve Bank of Australia board member Professor Warwick McKibbin and health expert Dr. Alexandra Sidorenko of the Australian National University.
In the European Union, said to be on "high alert", leaders called for calm as officials took measures to prevent the recent outbreak of H5N1 in wild, migrating birds -- mainly swans -- from spreading to farm poultry.
Sales of chicken have dropped up all across Europe, threatening to throw the continent's huge poultry industry into crisis.
One sign of mounting concern was the flood of orders pouring into the world's number one manufacturer of respiratory masks in France.
Germany, the Netherlands and Slovenia joined other European nations Friday by ordering all poultry kept indoors to ensure that domestic hens, ducks and geese do not come into contact with infected wild birds.
The other countries are Denmark, France, Greece, Luxembourg and Sweden.
The Netherlands went a step further and sought authorization from the European Commission to vaccinate free-range poultry against avian flu, the agriculture ministry said Friday.
In an earlier measure, the EU's Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health agreed on the automatic creation of three-kilometer (two-mile) protection zones and 10-kilometer surveillance zones around outbreaks of flu in wild birds.
The spread of the disease to poultry would trigger the creation of "buffer zones" which could cover an entire region of a country, and restrict the transport of poultry.
In Hong Kong, where the first reported outbreak of H5N1 in 1997 killed six people, the sale of live chickens at markets is to be banned by 2009, the South China Morning Post reported.
In Nigeria, officials announced another suspected H5N1 case at another farm in the northern state of Katsina, while health officials pressed on with the slaughter of domestic birds.
Meanwhile, authorities in neighboring Niger announced a state of alert and a 3.4-million-euro (four-million-dollar) emergency plan to monitor the border with Nigeria.
In Europe, the presence of H5N1 virus has so far been verified in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Ukraine and the European part of Russia. Almost all the cases involve migratory wild swans.
