Dutch authorities on Monday culled more than 200,000 chicks on two farms infected with bird flu, the government said, as several European countries battle the outbreak of a highly contagious strain of the virus.
Some 170,000 chicks were culled at a farm near Alkmaar, north of Amsterdam, while another 46,000 birds were killed at a farm in Willemstad, in the south.
In both cases, "
it is most likely the highly contagious H5 variant,
" the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement.
Read alsoAvian flu: the nightmare continues, more than a million additional animals must be slaughtered
In October, the Netherlands announced a confinement of poultry.
Farmers were urged to keep the birds indoors to stem the spread of the disease.
To date, at least 20 farms have been affected and hundreds of thousands of birds have been culled by National Food Safety Authority (NFSA) officers.
In France, the government announced Thursday that it is also preparing to slaughter more than a million birds in the coming weeks, to fight against the resurgence of avian influenza in farms.
Outbreaks have also been reported, particularly in Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Burkina Faso, where 500,000 poultry died or were slaughtered.