News Black Out

 "The bird flu virus has arrived in Italy," Francesco Storace, the Italian health minister, said Saturday at a news conference, announcing that 17 swans had been found dead in three southern regions: Calabria, Sicily and Puglia.

 The National Avian Influenza Lab in Padua confirmed H5N1 in five of the dead swans, and tests on others were continuing, Storace said.

 The arrival of bird flu in Western Europe has been predicted for months, since the virus has moved steadily from China to Russia to the Balkans and, in the last week, to West Africa.

 It is being carried by migrating birds, so all countries on their flight paths are vulnerable.

 "In some ways we would have expected it earlier in Italy," said Juan Lubroth, a senior veterinarian at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

 The discovery of the Italian outbreak seemed to be a model of early detection, underlining how bird flu can be controlled in countries that have the money and the scientific resources to do it.

 Outbreaks in poor countries like Nigeria, Turkey and Iraq percolated for months before they were discovered, allowing the virus to spread widely to commercial chicken flocks and even to humans.

 While the H5N1 virus does not readily spread from human to human, scientists worry that it will mutate into a form that can, setting off a worldwide human pandemic.

 Only about 160 people have become infected with the disease, mostly through close contact with sick birds, and about half of them have died.

 Police officers near Messina, Sicily, found two dead swans on Thursday and performed rapid screening tests on them in the wild, which suggested that the swans had a flu virus, according to ANSA, the official Italian news agency. Such simple tests are not specific enough to indicate a particular virus or strain, like H5N1.

 The carcasses were immediately sent to a veterinary institute in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, which sent samples to the laboratory in Padua, where the positive test results were returned Saturday.

 Following the tests, Storace prohibited all movement of live animals in the affected regions. There are no signs of infection in commercial poultry yet, he said.

 "There is no immediate danger for our country because our system of surveillance is efficient and has not contaminated bird farms," Mauro Delogu, an Italian virologist at the University of Bolgona, told ANSA.

 In Greece, health officials announced that three swans in the northern part of the country had tested positive for the virus. Hours later, European Union officials said that some swans in Bulgaria, near the Danube Delta, had as well.

 Dead swans have become an important sentinel because they are very susceptible to the flu virus and are so large that people notice when they die, Lubroth said. Swans in southern Italy do not normally migrate, he said, but their wetlands are along many bird migration routes.

 Last autumn, several European countries, including Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands, mandated that all commercial poultry be kept indoors, to prevent any contact with migrating birds. Greece also now requires that poultry be kept indoors and has banned the sale of live birds at street markets.

 Trying to calm public fears, the European Union's health commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, said: " We should not be unduly surprised or alarmed if such cases are found in the European Union. What is important is that we have the framework in place to take the appropriate measures as soon as possible to contain it and prevent its spread to poultry, and that is what we are doing."

 Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, said she was not surprised that infected birds had been found in southern Europe.

 "I view that as an expression of how birds fly," she said. "It's just like West Nile marching across the U.S.," she said, referring to the disease transmitted by mosquitoes that feed on infected birds. 'You follow the flight patterns."

 The variant strain of H5N1 found in Turkey and confirmed in Africa last week is identical to one found last year in dead migratory birds in a nature reserve in northern China, and later in Siberia. It is different from strains circulating among poultry in Southeast Asia and Indonesia.

 Two species of ducks, the northern pintail and the garganey, migrate in a southwesterly direction each fall from Siberia to Turkey and the Black Sea coast, and in some cases to central Africa, according to a recent article in New Scientist.

 Other species that share the same African wetlands migrate north in the spring, which raises the threat that the disease will be spread more widely around Western Europe later this year.

 Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Lawrence K. Altman contributed reporting for this article.