Bird Flu Swan Was From Outside UK

* Poultry owners within wild bird risk area must keep birds indoors or, if not possible, ensure they are kept away from wild birds
* Bird transport within 6 mile (10km) surveillance zone will be curbed
* Poultry within 1.8 mile (3km) protection zone must be kept indoors and will be tested

A dead swan found in Fife which tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu was a whooper swan, DNA tests by government scientists have found. The breed originates from outside the UK but it was unclear whether the dead bird picked up the disease abroad.

A number of migratory whooper swans have recently been checked in the UK and all results have been negative.

Some experts have suggested the swan could have died in another country and been washed up on the coast.

No other birds have tested positive for H5N1 since the discovery in Cellardyke on 29 March.

Whitehall sources told the BBC a "working hypothesis" is the bird could have died in another country and been washed up on the Scottish coast.

Early test results suggested the swan found in Scotland had an almost identical virus to birds found in Germany, which saw an outbreak of H5N1 in Ruegen last month.

The RSPB is hopeful that this, combined with the lack of any further cases, means the Cellardyke swan could be a "one-off".

The society's spokesman Andre Farrar said: "The likeliest scenario - and this has to be in the realms of speculation - is that this bird may have set off on its journey northwards, got part of the way across the North Sea, felt grotty, and landed on or fell into the sea, died and was washed into Cellardyke."

The whooper swan is known to migrate from Iceland, Scandinavia and northern Russia to spend winters in the UK, the Low countries and the south Baltic Sea.

Dr Martin Fowlie from the British Trust for Ornithology backed the theory but said another possibility was that the swan contracted the virus from another bird in the UK before it intended to move north.

Microbiologist Professor Hugh Pennington said confirmation of the swan's identity made it more likely that the case was an isolated one.

"This raises the likelihood that it had no contact with any native birds and that this case of H5N1 on our shores was a one-off," he added.

Earlier, professor Pennington told Radio 4's Today programme that if the swan caught the virus locally, birds would still have the disease but not been detected.

But he said bird flu would not be "a foot-and-mouth situation - the virus is not going to go on the rampage".

The H5N1 virus cannot pass easily from one person to another and therefore currently does not pose a large-scale threat to humans.

Experts, however, fear the virus could gain this ability if it mutates. They say it could trigger a flu pandemic in its new form, potentially putting millions of human lives at risk.

* Bird flu viruses have 16 H subtypes and nine N subtypes.
* Four types of the virus are known to infect humans - H5N1, H7N3, H7N7 and H9N2
* Most lead to minor symptoms, apart from H5N1
* H5N1 has caused more than 100 deaths in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam
* The World Health Organization says not all H5 or H7 strains are severe, but their ability to mutate means their presence is "always a cause for concern"

Tests on birds found near Cellardyke are still being carried out, and a UK helpline has received 8,000 reports of dead birds.

A six-mile (10km) surveillance zone and 1.8 mile (3km) protection zone in place around Cellardyke will remain for at least 30 days from the day the swan was found.

A wild bird risk area has also been established which includes 175 registered poultry premises, containing 3.1 million birds, 260,000 of which are free-range.

Ministers, meanwhile, are considering bringing in targets to regulate the time between reporting a dead bird and tests being completed, according to the sources.

One dead swan doesn't make a summer of panic

To ward off fears of a bird flu pandemic in a borderless world, our first rule should be: follow the science

Jackie Ashley
Monday April 10, 2006
The Guardian (UK)

There has been panic in Scotland, with an estimated 45,000 masks bought within days of the first reports of the possible pandemic, and calls for anyone with flu-like symptoms to be detained.
This, though, was three years ago, when the coming plague was Sars, an infection we were told might sweep the world as it emerged from China and Vietnam. There, it is true, several hundred people eventually died; the toll in Britain, and indeed Scotland, was zero.

So we have been here before. When we read of emergency food plans to tackle shortages, of school closures to cut the likely death toll among children and of even grimmer contingency plans for mass graves for up to 320,000 people who might die from bird flu, then we all need to pinch ourselves and remember the earlier waves of media-fanned panic. One dead swan has had quite a send-off.

I speak as an inveterate panicker, though an incompetent and lazy one. The prickling of the scalp when reports come in about some plague on the way is a feeling I know only too well. When we were told to stockpile water supplies - I can't remember quite why - I picked up three litre bottles and then decided any more would be too heavy to take home.
The three dusty cans of baked beans in the cupboard probably don't qualify as emergency supplies either, though we did give up eating beef for a while, unless someone else had cooked it and it seemed impolite to say no.

Of all the recent health panics, the most serious was undoubtedly BSE.
It was a stain through the later Tory years, a rural catastrophe that just went on and on. The science suggesting that the disease could be passed to humans was strong, and indeed new variant CJD has killed 155 people in Britain, though the peak year for deaths (28) was in 2000 and so far this year there have been just two.
That is awful, but it is a lot less awful than the estimates of deaths we heard then, ranging up to a "time bomb" of 130,000 people with the fatal brain infection.

The government was under terrible pressure from health-panickers on the one hand and distraught farmers on the other, and it did send out conflicting messages for a while. Yet the truth about BSE and Sars is probably also the truth about bird flu.
It is that public health precautions, though expensive and heavy-handed, do work. The ban on beef on the bone, the changes in animal-feed policy, the destruction of infected cattle and all the public warnings prevented the hundreds of thousands of horrible deaths we were told Britain faced.
Similarly, the limited quarantine and movement precautions deployed against Sars stopped that spreading beyond east Asia.

Then as now, the first rule is to try to follow the science. It was never the case that all eating of beef was risky; it was never the case that Chinese or Vietnamese people presented a special threat to the health of the British; and - so far - there has been no proven case of bird flu passing from one human to another.
Human cases have been reported in nine countries (Egypt, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Turkey, Iraq and Azerbaijan) and 109 people have died. But it seems they all lived or worked with birds that were infected. If the virus mutates, we could still be looking at a terrible problem - which is why the quiet contingency plans prepared by government, and then leaked with luridly alarming headlines, are mere common sense. But a plan is not a plague, and most of us know it. Unless you happen to be a gregarious Germanic swan or spend your day working in a bird sanctuary, there is no need to panic.

Again, most of us know it. We have a rough idea that the disease panics of the past few years are as nothing to the Aids disaster, which caused 3.1 million deaths worldwide last year and slashed the average lifespan across swaths of sub-Saharan Africa. Another big killer in the world is not a disease, but the motorcar - 1.2 million people are killed each year in traffic accidents, around 3,000 of them in Britain.

So why are we so fixated by bird flu, which is so far frankly marginal? Why those long, lugubrious reports from Fife villages, the busy deployment of BBC helicopters, the scary stories about lack of government preparedness ("families might have to wait up to four weeks to bury their dead")? One answer is simply that everyone knows the virus could mutate, as it has done from bird populations in the past, and governments have to take preparations seriously. And there is the usual media over-egging.

Yet a good health panic plays to other fears, social and political. BSE chimed with a general worry that modern farming was playing dangerously with nature. Somehow we were getting our just punishment for cheap supermarket food. Indeed, the disgusting use of mashed-up bovine remains as cattle-feed, a form of imposed and unnatural cannibalism, did turn out to be dangerous.

Sars and bird flu play to another fear, of a great pullulating mass of humanity in China and east Asia generally - a new world that is poor and assertive, and coming our way: if they don't get us with their cheap shoes or their global warming, they'll get us with their chickens.

The very word "pandemic" conveys a sense that in a world of cheap mass air travel and too many people, this is the sort of thing that's likely to happen. Never mind that the geese don't go through immigration control on their way here. Never mind that the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19, which killed about 21.6 million people, more than the first world war, took place without China being a world player, and without air travel or much immigration. These are diseases of the borderless world.

This is why keeping a sense of proportion is so important. It is right to keep a weather eye on the progress of avian flu, and to expect a properly prepared government to be stockpiling vaccines, quarantining infected areas and keeping us informed. It is always sensible to be a little sceptical about the politicians' preparedness.

But we have to show some trust in the public health authorities and the scientists who advise them. After Whitehall's experience of the early days of BSE, Sars and now the early warnings about bird flu, it would be bizarre if the government wasn't taking the dangers of a pandemic seriously. Politicians can be blamed for a lot, but hardly for a viral mutation. They get a lot wrong, but this time they seem to be getting it mostly right. Not convinced? Flu masks, apparently, are a snip at £1.48 plus VAT.

(VAT = Value Added Tax)

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