BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- European countries have stepped up their efforts to fight bird flu as the deadly disease continued its advance across the continent on Sunday.

    Veterinarians and soldiers were sent to check dead birds, cordon off affected areas and ensure that vehicles were not carrying fowl. Several countries have ordered all raised fowl kept indoors to avoid contact with migratory birds.

    In Paris, French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand said France was taking all necessary steps to prevent the spread of the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

    He described the strain, detected in a wild duck found dead in the central-eastern Ain Department, as an isolated case, saying no poultry or humans had been affected.

    The French government has so far pledged 6 million euros (7 million U.S. dollars) to help soften the economic blow for farmers, and has already ordered all poultry and tame birds to be kept indoors to prevent possible contamination from wild fowl.

    Also on Sunday, the German army deployed a special unit on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where over 40 cases of H5N1 have been found, to intensify the fight against bird flu.

    Defense officials said they had dispatched a 19-member unit specializing in decontamination to help reduce the spread of the virus.

    The so-called ABC unit has already set up their equipment and planned to start disinfecting both vehicles and people on the island, which was declared a "protected zone," according to German news agency DPA.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to the island on Sunday, not as the leader of the nation, but as the parliamentary representative of the region which forms part of her electorate.

    In Rome, the Italian Health Ministry said a wild duck found dead in central Italy had been confirmed to be carrying the lethal H5N1 strain, raising to 16 the total number of cases found in the country.

    Italy reported its first cases of bird flu last week when eight wild swans found in the southern regions of Puglia, Calabria and Sicily tested positive for the virus.

    The Italian government has begun to carry out a series of precautionary measures, including the creation of a 3-km high-risk protective zone around each outbreak area, and a surveillance zone of an additional 7 km.

    Meanwhile, Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported that the British government is deeply concerned at the prospect of bird flu reaching the country.

    The government admitted that it is increasingly likely that bird flu will arrive in Britain, and the National Farmers' Union has told members to prepare to take poultry indoors at short notice, said the newspaper.

    The British government has established plans for exclusion zones if any wild bird is found to be infected with H5N1. If any poultry was found to be infected the entire flock would face being culled.

    The government is still considering whether to vaccinate the country's entire stock of 150 million poultry for fear that all poultry export might be banned as a result.

    In Romania, where H5N1 was detected in two villages last week, authorities completed a cull of about 22,000 domestic birds in the village of Topraisar. Preliminary tests showed an H5 subtype of the bird flu virus in birds in two more villages near the Black Sea.

    The Romanian authorities have warned that the country could see human cases of the disease because it has a large number of small household farms in poor rural areas without good sanitation.

    Elsewhere, Austria ordered all poultry and fowl kept indoors starting at midnight Saturday, after signs that a wild swan found dead in Vienna had been infected with H5N1, health officials said.

    Serbia said veterinary teams would start traveling around the country on Monday to make sure that farmers were obeying orders to keep the poultry inside. Enditem