EU veterinary experts will decide tomorrow whether to approve anti-bird flu vaccination programmes in France and the Netherlands.
A veterinarian carries a duck to analyse in Donana national park in Spain
The experts on the Standing Committee for the food chain and animal health spent the day discussing the implications of allowing country-specific vaccination plans as part of efforts to curb the spread of the disease.
The experts from the member states were being given until tomorrow to decide whether vaccination can go ahead.
"Any vaccination agreed for France or for the Netherlands would apply to those countries only," explained one EU official. "The decisions will be based on the particular situations regarding poultry and the containment of bird flu in those countries.
Any other country in the EU wishing later to adopt a vaccination programme would have to submit a separate application for approval to the Committee."
Vaccination programmes require EU approval on health and safety grounds, and also because of the export trade implications for the whole EU of allowing vaccination in one or other member state.
Slovakia today became the eighth EU member state to confirm outbreaks of bird flu.
The H5 virus has been found in two wild birds, and samples were being sent to the EU's special laboratory in Weybridge, Surrey, to establish whether the cases involve the deadly H5N1 strain.
Bird flu has been reported in 15 more countries in February, marking a sudden resurgence of the H5N1 influenza virus, which scientists fear could trigger a pandemic if it mutates and jumps from person to person.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu was also for first time confirmed in Hungary and Croatia.
In India, where officials are scrambling to contain a major outbreak in poultry, hundreds of people turned up for screening at medical camps in areas where bird flu has been reported.
At least 15 nations have reported outbreaks in birds this month, an indication that the virus, which has killed more than 90 people, is spreading faster.
Migratory birds are thought to be at least one way the disease is being carried and more than 30 countries have now reported cases since 2003, seven of them recording human infections.
Hungary said today that tests showed the virus in three dead swans found last week, while Croatia also confirmed H5N1 had been found in a dead swan on an island in the Adriatic.
Bosnia confirmed its first cases of bird flu yesterday, while Malaysia said the H5N1 avian flu virus killed chickens near the capital.
Greece on Tuesday confirmed its seventh case of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in a swan and was awaiting results from nine more birds.
The swan, found on the northern Greek Chalkidiki peninsula, had been sent to an European Union laboratory in London last week after testing positive for H5.
In a report on its website (www.who.int), the WHO said the H5N1 virus has been undergoing steady genetic mutations that have affected patterns of virus transmission and spread among domestic and wild birds. They have not had any discernible impact on the disease in humans, however.
Infections in people remain rare. Studies have shown that different H5N1 strains have become progressively more lethal in birds and are also hardier, surviving several days longer in the environment, the WHO says.