By Jeremy Smith BRUSSELS, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Europe must stay alert to the risk of bird flu affecting humans and focus on small flocks kept by amateurs and small breeders as the main danger, a senior scientist said on Wednesday. So far, the nearest that human cases of bird flu have come to the European Union is Turkey and Egypt, where four people died from the disease as recently as last month. "The main risk we see in the European Union is not the big chicken barns because they are usually inside and surveillance is good," said Johan Giesecke, chief scientist at the Sweden-based European Centre of Disease Prevention and Control. "It's the hobby flocks -- that's the main risk and where we fear that infection of the birds may spread to humans," he said. "Hobby flocks" is the term given to small collections of birds, usually fewer than 200, such as pigeons, chickens or turkeys. They usually roam freely, often in backyards, and so can mix quite easily with any wild birds in the vicinity. "You do have human cases in Indonesia, almost every week. There have been cases in Egypt ... it (bird flu) is smouldering still and there's no reason for complacency," he said. The main fear, health experts say, is that the bird flu virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily between humans, possibly triggering a pandemic that could kill millions. So far, human-to-human transmissions have only occurred in Asia. In the Egypt cases, where four women died within a week in December, all are thought to have resulted from exposure to dead or backyard birds. That brought Egypt's human death toll from bird flu to 19 since it first emerged in the country in 2006. Deaths from the lethal H5N1 bird flu strain now total more than 215 globally since 2003, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and some 350 cases of infection. Turkey reported four deaths from the strain in 2006, WHO figures show. "If you have a hobby flock, it's really in your back yard -- they (birds) can walk up to your kitchen door. The proximity to a hobby flock is greater," Giesecke said. "So owners of hobby flocks should be very careful to watch for the disease in their birds and they should bring sick or dead birds to the vet," he said in an interview. Humans are usually infected with the disease through close contact with live infected birds. Birds shed the influenza virus in their faeces and so contact with it -- for example, when visiting enclosures or markets where birds have been recently kept -- is also a possible transmission route, experts say. "Avian influenza has been known for at least 150 years," Giesecke said. "There have always been human cases but very few deaths. So people do get infected, they get some symptoms, often conjunctivitis and you tell that they have the virus." (Editing by Chris Johnson)
Health workers collect chickens from a poultry farm in the Nimra village, about 240 km (149 miles) north of the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, January 23, 2008.The communist government of ...
