India said it was testing dozens of people for bird flu today, while France confirmed its first avian cases of the H5N1 virus as the deadly strain spread around the globe.
Egyptian authorities closed Cairo zoo and seven other state-run zoos around the country for two weeks from today after cases of the H5N1 virus were detected on Thursday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed alarm about the rapid spread of the disease on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen and Romania detected bird flu in poultry found dead in a village and a summer resort near the Black Sea port of Constanta.
Avian influenza has flared anew in recent weeks, spreading among birds in Europe and parts of Africa, and prompting authorities to impose bans on the poultry trade, introduce mass culling and vaccinate poultry flocks.
The World Health Organisation says the H5N1 virus has killed 91 people worldwide since late 2003. Two hundred million birds across Asia, parts of the Middle East, Europe and Africa have died of the virus or been culled.
The Indian government said it had found no case of human avian influenza after preliminary tests on a dead farmer earlier suspected to have been the country's first human victim of the disease. The world's second-most populous country, known for its inadequate public health infrastructure, was testing people for avian flu after 50,000 birds died in Nandurbar district in western Maharashtra and tests on some fowl showed H5N1 bird flu.
"There are, however, no reports of any human cases of avian influenza," the ministry said in a statement.
An earlier report from a top administrator of India's Surat district in the western Gujarat state and the state's health minister had suggested the dead man had been a poultry farm worker, but the health ministry statement did not confirm this.
In France, Europe's biggest poultry producer, the farm ministry confirmed that a duck found dead on Monday in the east of the country had H5N1. France's H5N1 case was one of several wild ducks found dead near Lyon in a region famous for the quality of its chickens.
Elsewhere, authorities in northern Spain are testing a duck found dead in a lake to see if it carried H5N1, while Britain said bird flu was now more likely to reach its shores.
Indonesia confirmed yesterday that a 19th person had died of bird flu, which has been reported in chickens and other domesticated fowl in most provinces of the sprawling country of 220 million people.