UPPSALA - Europe must remain vigilant about bird flu even though the number of cases reported in recent weeks has declined, experts warned on Monday, noting that the disease would spread again in the autumn when migratory birds return.
"Now the number of bird flu cases, at least in the European region, has gone down. This means that the migratory birds have gone, but we should be prepared. ... They will come back in autumn," the head of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Zsuzsanna Jakab, told reporters.
She was speaking on the sidelines of a three-day conference in Uppsala, Sweden, on bird flu gathering experts from the European Union, the World Health Organization and 48 European countries to discuss ways of improving national and European preparedness for a possible bird flu pandemic.
"I think we have to learn to live with the situation, that in spring and also in autumn ... they fly back and forth, (and) there will be a number of cases of avian influenza," she said.
Marc Danzon, the European regional director for the WHO, said that a glance at a map showed that the trajectory of migratory birds is the same as that of the H5N1 highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu.
"The wild birds and the infection are really following the same route. There are highs and there are downs ... but without being too predictive, it will come back," he told reporters.
"No continent is safe," Danzon stressed, adding that any lack of vigilance during what appeared to be a calm period posed a "major risk".
The experts meeting on Monday agreed that European countries were increasingly prepared to cope with a possible pandemic but major efforts were still required.
"Preparedness is being improved and strengthened month by month and week by week across Europe," Jakab said.
"The bad news, however, is that there are still gaps in our knowledge about influenza and in our preparedness against a pandemic," she said.
Jakab said it was "inevitable that a pandemic will occur (but) we do not know when it will happen, what virus it will cause or how severe it will be."
Even a "mild" pandemic -- such as the flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968 -- would "cause disruption to our societies and result in a significant number of deaths," she said.
Experts fear that the H5N1 virus will mutate and become easily transmissible from human to human, causing a pandemic like the Spanish flu in 1918 which killed millions of people.
Since the end of 2003, the H5N1 virus has infected 207 people around the world, killing 115 of them, according to the WHO.
Hubert Hrabcik, the director general of public health at Austria's ministry of health and women, said "nearly all European countries have now finalized their preparedness plan."
The top priority is now to make sure that the plans laid out on paper are easily applicable in a real-life situation, he said.

05/15/2006 13:41 GMT