The European Union will ban all imports of live bird and feathers from Turkey from Monday after laboratory tests detected highly contagious avian influenza in the country, the European Commission said. So far, however, the EU executive is taking no steps over a suspected outbreak of bird flu in Romania. Results of bird flu tests in Romania and Turkey should be known by Wednesday, Oct. 12 and the Commission would act immediately in accordance with those findings, it said. "There is a difference between the two cases," Philip Tod told a daily news briefing, referring to Romania and Turkey. "The virological analyses have confirmed that the virus is present (in Turkey) but at the moment we are not able to say what type of virus we are talking about -- how pathogenic it is," said Tod, the Commission's health spokesman. "The decision will be enforced from this evening." For Romania, laboratory tests had so far failed to confirm the presence of bird flu, he said. The EU had no plan to ban Romanian poultry imports if this situation continued, he was quoted as saying by Reuters. If the Romanian cases did turn out to be the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, lethal to humans, they would be the first evidence the virus had spread to Europe from Asia where it has killed 65 people and millions of birds in Asia since 2003.
