A one-month Europe-wide ban on live bird imports has been agreed in an attempt to prevent the spread of bird flu.
Veterinary experts met in Brussels to thrash out the deal to prohibit all commercial imports of exotic and domestic birds.
Britain made an urgent call for the ban following the death of an imported parrot diagnosed with the potentially-lethal H5N1 form of the bird flu virus at a quarantine centre in Essex.
EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou
The announcement of the ban came just after it was revealed that dead wild geese in western Germany had tested positive for bird flu.
But officials said further tests would be needed to confirm the virus and to tell whether it was the deadly H5N1 strain. And last night the European Food Safety Authority repeated advice that poultry and eggs should be thoroughly cooked to avoid microbiological risk such as salmonella in the wake of concerns about the virus.
The EU-wide import ban does not include individual personal imports of birds, but there will be extra checks on people bringing more than five pet birds into a country.
A European Commission spokesman said the one month ban would allow officials more time to research the situation.
The ban covers parrots, caged birds, pigeons and birds of prey, more than 230,000 of which have been imported into the EU in the last three months alone.
Meanwhile, fears grow of further avian flu cases in Europe. Spanish zoos have been ordered to keep birds indoors, or to vaccinate those that needed to stay outside, and French poultry farmers in 21 regions have been asked to take their free-range birds indoors.
Both countries have banned bird sales at open-air markets.
However, EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou has urged caution and said: "We shouldn't panic every time there is a dead wild bird."
In Indonesia, health ministers said a 23-year-old man from Bogor, in West Java, has become the country's fourth human victim of bird flu.
The European Food Safety Authority last night repeated its advice that poultry and eggs should be thoroughly cooked to avoid microbiological risks such as salmonella.
A spokeswoman said that, given the measures already in place, the risk of bird flu entering the food chain was in fact very low.
She added: "Should this happen in future, cooking will also be protective." The advice has been issued because anxiety about bird flu has raised public concern about the safety of poultry products.
The spokeswoman said: "We are not saying anything new, we are simply reiterating food safety advice."
The Guardian reported today that emergency plans were being drawn up by Defra to deal with the carcasses of millions of chickens, turkeys and geese culled in the event of a big outbreak of the virus.
A Defra spokesman said: "Contingency plans are being consulted on with the industry which involve the killing of flocks of infected birds should avian flu be found in this country."
Meanwhile authorities in China have recorded a third major outbreak of bird flu in two weeks, reports stated. Officials said more than 500 chickens and ducks died of the virus in a village in the central Hunan province.