Croatia Kills Thousands Of Birds To Fight Avian Flu
23 October 2005 -- Croatian authorities today are destroying thousands of domestic fowl in the east of the country, where wild swans died recently of bird flu.
Croatian radio reports that veterinary teams are culling birds in a 3-kilometer radius around Zdenci lake, where the swans were found last week.
It is not yet known whether the swans carried the H5N1 strain, which is potentially lethal to humans and which has been detected in birds in Romania and Turkey.
Croatia's neighbor Montenegro today began testing its poultry for bird flu as part of precautionary measures.
In Sweden, tests on a duck that died of bird flu have shown it was not infected by the H5N1 strain but with a more moderate variant of the virus.
Outside Europe, wild birds are reported dying in large numbers in northwest Iran, but there's no word that bird flu is the cause.
(AFP/AP)