Test for bird flu in north Wales

Deliveries to an unnamed country estate in rural Denbighshire were being turned away, the Daily Post website said.

A Welsh Assembly Government spokeswoman said: "We are investigating a notifiable disease in birds at a location in north Wales. Reports are not confirmed and tests are ongoing."

A dead swan carrying a deadly form of the virus was found in Scotland last April. The bird, discovered at Cellardyke in Fife, had the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain.

In February, the Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Suffolk at the centre of a bird flu outbreak resumed work when Environment Secretary David Miliband said the facility in Holton had been relicensed after being disinfected.

Experts at the Veterinary Laboratory Agency found that the H5N1 virus which killed turkeys at the plant was 99.96% similar to the strain which infected geese in southern Hungary.

In October 2005, Dr Christianne Glossop, Wales's chief vet, told the BBC that Wales had a detailed contingency plan in place in case of an outbreak.

She was speaking as tests in Romania confirmed a strain of flu potentially fatal to humans.

"One of the difficulties here is that we can't protect ourselves from wild birds flying into Britain and so that avenue of protection is not open to us," she explained at the time.

Share this article

Send this article to a friend »

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Reddit
• Facebook
• StumbleUpon

What are these?