An outbreak of bird flu on a farm run by Europe’s biggest turkey manufacturer Bernard Matthews is the highly pathogenic H5N1 version of the virus, which can kill humans, the European Commission said on Saturday.Government veterinary experts were called to the farm near Lowestoft in eastern England late on Thursday. Preliminary tests showed the birds were killed by the H5 strain of avian flu.The British government is enforcing EU-agreed controls to contain the outbreak, which means setting up a protection zone with a radius of 3 km and a surveillance zone of 10 km around the infected farm, the Commission said. It was the second confirmed case of H5N1 in the 27-country European Union this year, following one in Hungary.Television footage showed hundreds of dead turkeys being tipped into a truck for disposal after the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs moved to contain the outbreak which has killed 2,500 birds on the farm. The farm has 160,000 turkeys.
