Berlin - An outbreak of deadly H5N1 bird flu in German poultry appeared confined to a single goose, animal health officials said Sunday after quick-fire tests on 1,200 birds killed in a cull. The goose was found last Monday in the yard of a commune for intellectually handicapped people in the sleepy German hill village of Wickersdorf.
All poultry within a radius of 13 kilometres was killed by injection by Saturday, with police and veterinarians in white protective clothing going door-to-door in search of birds.
Amateur poultry breeders, who said their life's work been ruined by the cull, vented fury at the handicapped group, which had only moved to the village four weeks ago and offered animal care as a form of therapy.
The H5N1 strain of avian influenza is potentially fatal to people and scientists fear it may mutate into a form that can be communicated from human to human.
The outbreak began in Germany two weeks ago with wild swans and grebes dying on lakes. Germany had only had one outbreak of H5N1 in domestic poultry before, near Leipzig in 2006.
Thomas Schulz, spokesman for the state health ministry of Thuringia, said in Eisenach that tissue tests of the hundreds of culled ducks, geese and hens had found no more H5N1. The remains were being incinerated.
"The complete tests will take until Wednesday, but so far there is no evidence of a wider outbreak," he said.
All the handicapped people and their carers had been checked as well and none had been infected.
Schulz said officials understood the handicapped folk were devastated at losing their other three geese and five ducks from the commune's pond, but the cull was unavoidable.
In the remote hills of central Germany, amateur breeders of the Brakel, an ancient European breed of chicken, were dazed and angry after being woken in the night and seeing their flocks destroyed.
"It's all the fault of these newcomers," grumbled one breeder in nearby Volkmannsdorf who lost all his hens.
Another man, Heinz Rosenbusch, 67, who has bred the hens for 46 years, said bitterly: "Our pedigree silver Brakel won awards in the national shows. Never again. I'm too old now to start all over from scratch."
