Avian flu strain confirmed in Romania

BERLIN -- As lab tests confirmed yesterday that the most lethal strain of bird flu has reached mainland Europe for the first time, people across the continent sought to protect themselves against a disease for which there is no existing vaccine. Officials, meanwhile, urged calm after a week of issuing dire forecasts.

Germans streamed to doctors' offices demanding flu shots; Belgians descended upon pharmacies in search of fast-dwindling stocks of antiflu medication, while Serbians snapped up tens of thousands of surgical face masks.

From Portugal to Poland, a poultry disease that until recently was confined to distant Asia suddenly seemed disconcertingly near as public health agencies, after a series of conflicting reports, confirmed that the H5N1 strain of bird flu had arrived in Europe by way of Romania.

The disease was carried by migrating birds and may now be spreading through poultry and pigeon flocks. Of far greater concern is the prospect of the fast- mutating virus transforming into a strain contagious to humans, as some epidemiologists predict.

''The virus has the potential to change and mutate, and thus spark a terrible pandemic of the kind that has occurred every once and a while over past centuries," Klaus Stoehr, head of the World Health Organization's influenza program, told German NDR radio. ''There is no question that if such a pandemic occurs, we'll be looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths worldwide."

No human cases of the disease have emerged in Europe, and virologists say Asia remains the continent most likely to spawn an epidemic.

Health officials in Romania said yesterday that tests by a British laboratory have clinically established the presence of the H5N1 virus in dead ducks found a week ago in the Danube delta, Europe's largest wetland.

European national leaders urged their citizens not to become unduly alarmed. But some news media took an opposite tack: ''Panic!" read the front-page headline in 24 Chasa, one of the leading newspapers in Bulgaria.

Poultry sales plummeted across Europe and in Turkey, where presence of the H5N1 strain was confirmed last week, even as top leaders made a show of dining on chicken for the benefit of press and television cameras. ''We are not in a situation of pandemic," said Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France. ''We must not give in to panic."

International health agency officials stressed that the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, in its existing form, infects humans only in rare instances and with great difficulty.

Europeans, they said, have little to fear for the moment. Yet the officials also warned that H521 shows extraordinary capacity to mutate and could rapidly turn into a virus able to spread from human to human.

Stoehr said countries need to wake up to the reality of a fast-moving bird disease and prepare for a pandemic. ''It's about getting ready for an outbreak to occur, even in Europe," he said. Pandemic refers to an outbreak of disease spread over huge areas.

Many epidemiologists say they think bird flu poses the single most dangerous disease threat to humanity.

The World Health Organization, the US Department of Health, and some of the world's most prominent virologists have warned in recent days that the altered H5N1 virus could spawn an influenza pandemic that could spread around the world in weeks, killing millions. Health agencies and epidemiologists have also warned that the world is woefully unprepared to meet such an outbreak.

''Bird flu is a disease among animals; it's very difficult for this virus to move from poultry into humans," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said from the UN body's headquarters in Rome. ''Our concern is that it will change in a way that will allow it to easily move between humans, and that will trigger a pandemic."

Since 2003, when the dormant disease reemerged, at least 65 people have died of bird flu, all in Asia. Vietnam has been hardest hit -- 44 dead -- with the other deaths occurring in Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia. So far, most victims have contracted the disease from poultry, including farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and at least one person who drank raw duck's blood, a delicacy in some Asian cultures.

Millions of chickens, ducks, and geese have been slaughtered in an effort to bring the disease under control. H5N1 is the most virulent of avian flu strains because it is capable of acquiring genes from other viruses, so it may acquire the ''code" of another virus that is infectious to humans. If that occurs, it would spread among population centers at jet speed, carried by travelers to every continent in hours or days.

In Vietnam yesterday, a top American government scientist said a worldwide outbreak of deadly influenza is certain -- if not from H5N1, then from a different flu virus. ''It's a matter of 'when,' not 'if,' " Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said. ''Inevitably we're going to have a pandemic."

The deadliest pandemic of modern times occurred in 1918 when the so-called Spanish flu hurtled around the planet in a few months, killing at least 20 million people and perhaps as many as 50 million, according to medical historians.