As Germany and the Netherlands moved to bring in special measures to protect against a possible outbreak of avian flu which could spread to people, Irish experts prepared to meet again next week to examine contingency plans.
A cross-departmental committee drawn from the departments of Health and Agriculture has been preparing an action plan to cope with the possible arrival of the flu here.
The Department of Health confirmed that it has ordered a stockpile of drugs to protect the public against the possible spread of the disease from birds to people.
Ireland is most likely to rely on antiviral drugs because of the difficulty of finding a suitable vaccine for the flu which can mutate or change its structure.
However, health experts were stressing yesterday that the World Health Organisation had not warned of increased risk to people from avian flu and that there was no evidence of sustained transmission of the disease between people that would cause a pandemic.
Despite these assurances, both the Dutch and French authorities are taking proactive measures to prevent the flu arriving in their countries following confirmation that it had been found in wildbirds in Russia. The fear is that winter migratory birds will spread the disease to the rest of Europe.
Earlier this week authorities in the Netherlands ordered its poultry farmers to keep their birds indoors as a precaution.
A network of bird watchers and ornithologists, working for Dutch virologist Dr Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus University, is collecting swabs and faecal samples weekly from wild birds so that scientists can analyse them for traces of bird flu. So far, no trace of the most dangerous strain of the disease, H5NI, has been found in the samples.
A group of German experts, under the leadership of its agriculture ministry, met yesterday to consider measures to prevent the disease breaking out. They discussed a temporary restriction on keeping poultry in open fields to prevent contact with migrating wild birds.
German border control officials had already been instructed to intensify checks to prevent birds being brought in to the country.
Yesterday Russian veterinary workers incinerated thousands of birds in an intensified effort to stop the epidemic spreading across the Ural Mountains, which lie about 1,207km (750 miles) east of Moscow and divide the Asian part of Russia from the European part.
The disease was carried from Asia where over 60 people have died, by mallard and pochard ducks migrating from southeast Asia.
The concern is that infected birds may come into contact with wildstocks from the Russian interior that winter in western Europe or with stocks which move southwards through central Europe to the Middle East and the Mediterranean.