OINOUSSES (Greece), Oct 18: Greece on Tuesday banned all poultry shipments in the eastern Aegean Sea region and placed the elderly owners of a poultry flock under medical surveillance as it awaited tests to show whether the deadly Asian strain of bird flu has reached the country.

A day after antibodies for the H5 avian flu virus were detected in a live turkey from Oinousses, an islet off the eastern island of Chios, the Greek authorities stepped up tests on the same flock and announced steps to beef up the country’s anti-flu vaccine stock.

Deputy agriculture minister Alexandros Kontos told an emergency news conference on Tuesday that nine more samples and a dead turkey have been taken to a European Union-certified laboratory in the northern port of Salonika, where tests are underway to verify the H5 strain discovery on Monday.

That first result, established by a ministry laboratory in Athens, was based on a batch of blood samples taken from the flocks of two Oinousses poultry-raisers on Oct 14, Kontos said.

The ministry initially said the Salonika laboratory will need at least a week to determine whether the virus was the H5N1 subtype that can be lethal to humans.

Later on Tuesday, the ministry changed tack and said final word on the H5N1 subtype would be given by a second EU-certified laboratory in Weybridge, southeast England, which was sent a sample of the suspect turkey in the morning.

Weybridge is the lab which on Saturday confirmed the presence of the potentially lethal H5N1 strain in Romania.

Kontos denied reports that other suspect cases of avian flu have turned up in other parts of Greece.

“Until now, there have been no positive samples beyond what was found on Oinousses,” he said, adding that the ministry is examining bird tissue sent from across the country.

Kontos likewise denied reports that poultry was recently imported into Chios from the nearby Turkish coast.

He noted that any such shipments would have been stopped by customs officials, given that the import of livestock products from Turkey has been prohibited for years.

Poultry flocks on other Greek islands facing the Turkish coast are now being monitored, and kept isolated from wild birds, Kontos said. “There is no risk from the consumption of poultry products,” he said.

On Oinoussa proper, Chios prefect Polydoras Lambrinoudis told an AFP reporter that authorities had already disinfected the area where the suspect turkey was discovered, as well as neighbouring coops.

But even as the agriculture ministry insisted that Greece’s professional poultry farms are inspected daily and are safe because their chickens are kept indoors, both Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates declared a ban on all imports of poultry and related derivatives from Greece.—AFP