14 DAY TRIAL // A British government official recently announced that the chances of bird flu virus mutating into a form that spreads between humans are "very low".
Sir David King, a spokeswoman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, made this statement, characterizing rumors of an imminent global pandemic as misleading. The bird was found in an advanced state of decay, it's missing head making it hard to identify.
This announcement came when Scotland found the first case of bird flu - a swan on Sunday, in Cellardyke, Fife, after examining 1,100 birds since February. A 10 km surveillance zone and 3 km protection zone was placed around Cellardyke and will remain for at least 30 days from the day the swan was found.
"The one swan doesn't mean bird flu has arrived here. We need to see more evidence of spread before we can say that it has arrived in the UK," King said, adding that bird flu was "absolutely not" present among poultry in Britain.
The H5N1 virus can not pass from one person to another and does not currently pose a large-scale threat to humans. "We have got a virus in the bird population that has gone on since 1996, and in Asia particularly there has been a lot of contact between human beings and the birds that have got that virus," King said, adding that, in despite of this, a human virus has not developed.