European Union (EU) countries agreed on Thursday to improve cooperation on monitoring the highly-contagious poultry disease avian influenza.

Veterinary and medical experts from the 25 nations met in Brussels and agreed that the threats posed by flu viruses "need separate but consistent and coordinated actions", said a press release of the EU executive European Commission.

The recent epidemic in Asia "should induce the member states to intensify the work to update and adapt their avian influenza contingency plans," it added.

The meeting was held in the wake of the recent pandemic of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian flu which killed 60 people in South-East Asia and led to the culling of hundreds of thousands of birds in the region.

Scientists have warned that the virus, recently also found in Russia, could mutate into a virus capable of being passed on from one human to the other.

Source: Xinhua