Bird Flu - Avian Influenza
Advice about bird flu (avian influenza), including advice on food safety and links to the latest updates.
What is Bird Flu?
Avian influenza is a disease of birds, not humans. People can become infected but rarely are.
Bird flu is spread by movement of infected birds or contact with faeces, either directly or through contaminated objects. Some strains spread easily and quickly between birds in poultry populations.
Latest Updates
For control measures and the latest situation, go to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) website.
If you see an unusual number of dead wild birds, call DEFRA on 0845 933 5577 - see our Dead Animals page for more details.
Risks to Human Health
In rare cases, strains of bird flu have caused serious illness and deaths in people infected from close contact with infected birds, but do not easily spread from person to person.
However, the potential for avian influenza, such as the current H5N1 virus, to change into a form that both causes severe disease in humans and spreads easily from person to person is a major concern for world health - see Pandemic Flu Advice.
