# 1404
It seems that a day hardly goes by without our hearing of another batch of infected birds somewhere in Europe. Two years ago, H5N1 was a regional problem in a handful of South-East Asian countries.
Today it has been found in over 60 countries, and is popping up with worrisome regularity.
German chicken tests positive for H5N1 flu strain
BERLIN (Reuters) - A third case of a chicken testing positive for the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in the northeast German state of Brandenburg was confirmed by state authorities on Wednesday.
A police spokesman in Neuruppin, north of Berlin, confirmed that a chicken on a small farm in the town of Blumenthal in the Ostprignitz-Ruppin district had tested positive for the virus.
All 31 birds in the village were culled. It was the third case in 10 days in Brandenburg, a rural state that surrounds Berlin and is on the border with Poland. There have been eight cases of the H5N1 bird flu virus in Poland this month.
Officials in Brandenburg sealed off a protection zone with a radius of three km (two miles) and imposed a surveillance zone of 10 km radius around the area. There are 150,000 birds in the 10-km zone.
Earlier this month, two chickens in the Oberhavel district further west tested positive for H5N1. Eleven birds in a small Oberhavel farm were suspected of having the virus, of which five died and two were sent for tests which proved positive, the state Agriculture Ministry said.
