EU Law Blog

Bird flu is now in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria (not yet an EU Member State) and Slovenia and Turkey.

The EU Commission described the measures being taken as follows:

The measures being applied by Italy are, as for Greece, the establishment of a high risk area (a 3 km protection zone) around each of the outbreaks and a surrounding surveillance zone of 10 km. In the protection zone, poultry must be kept indoors, movement of poultry is banned except directly to the slaughterhouse and the dispatch of meat outside the zone is forbidden except where products have undergone the controls provided for in EU food controls legislation (i.e meat sourced from healthy animals in registered farms, subject to ante and post mortem checks by vets in the slaughterhouse). In both the protection zone and the surveillance zone, on-farm biosecurity measures must be strengthened, hunting of wild birds is banned and disease awareness of poultry owners and their families must be carried out.

But a proposal for a directive on combatting avian flu published in April 2005 does not seem to have been adopted yet.