Bird flu prompts cull at British duck breeding farm

A bird flu infection at a duck breeding farm in the north of England prompted the culling of 6,000 birds Tuesday.

Vets were investigating whether this outbreak is linked to that at a poultry farm in the Netherlands at the weekend and one in Germany earlier in the month.

A 10-kilometre exclusion zone was set up around the Yorkshire village of Nafferton to curb the spread of the disease.

The virus has been identified as H5 but not the H5N1 strain that can be deadly to humans.

Environment Secretary Liz Truss said the risk to public health was very low and the Environment Department's Animal and Plant Health Agency said the risk of the disease spreading was "probably quite low."

The European Commission said the outbreak was likely to be linked to droppings from migratory birds and to the outbreak in the Netherlands and in Germany.

London University virologist John Oxford said that recent outbreaks had not spread to humans.

"There've been outbreaks of this infection in Korea and South-East Asia over the last year. There's been an outbreak in Germany, now an outbreak in Holland, now an outbreak in England," he told the BBC. "In no case, in none of those countries, involving many hundreds of thousands of birds, has there been any serious human infection."

The Nafferton outbreak is the first in Britain since 2008.