By Svetlana Kovalyova

VERONA, Italy, March 22 (Reuters) - Europe has boosted control and response systems to bird flu and does not need a preventive vaccination of poultry to fight the disease, a top United Nations veterinary expert said on Thursday.

Thousands of poultry were culled and sales plunged in many European countries last year after outbreaks of bird flu, causing millions of euros in losses to farmers and industry.

Some scientists believe that preventive vaccination should be carried out for poultry, as is routinely done for certain diseases in children, to limit the risk of spreading the virus.

But the chief veterinary officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Joseph Domenech said "there was no reason" to implement costly and logistically difficult preventive vaccination in Europe which has learned to react quickly and efficiently to bird flu outbreaks.

"Vaccination is a powerful tool to control bird flu. But it has to be used when there is a need for it, and primarily, when there is a high risk of spread and infection to humans in endemic countries with a lot of outbreaks," Domenech said.

"When a country has very few outbreaks or no outbreaks at all, there is no indication for vaccination," he told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a bird flu and vaccination conference in Verona.

Avian flu remains mainly a bird virus, but experts fear the deadly H5N1 virus could mutate into a form easily transmitted from person to person and sweep the world, killing millions.

The virus has killed 169 people worldwide since 2003, according to the U.N's World Health Organisation (WHO).

Domenech said the risk of introducing avian influenza to Europe from other continents remained, especially from Africa where bird flu has been permanently present in some countries.

But European countries have shown ability to deal with outbreaks immediately, like Britain earlier this year, he said.

Under a European Union directive adopted in December 2005, member states can carry out not only emergency vaccination, but also preventive ones against avian influenza.

But the costs of vaccination are high and the procedure is cumbersome.

Only two EU countries, the Netherlands and Germany, carry out preventive vaccination and less than 0.1 percent of all EU poultry has been covered by the campaigns, Alberto Laddomada, a senior European Commission veterinary official, told reporters at the conference.

VACCINATION OUTSIDE EUROPE

Poultry vaccination alone cannot fight bird flu, but can be used together with close monitoring of the situation and prompt measures to stop the spread of disease, said Domenech.

Looking beyond Europe, he said Vietnam -- where bird flu killed 42 people, the world's second-highest number after Indonesia -- has made a considerable progress in vaccination and may be a model for Indonesia and other countries.

Poultry vaccination in Indonesia -- where the number of human deaths exceeds 60 -- runs into huge problems reaching remote villages and needs financial support from donors, he said.

A successful vaccination campaign in China has helped the country to be dropped from the list of endemic areas, Domenech and Bernard Vallat, General Director of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), told a news conference.

Vallat said existing vaccines were not perfect and called for an increase of investments into research to create more efficient and easy-to-implement vaccines.

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