A policeman stands guard near the farm in Holton, England, on Saturday. (AFP)

Holton (England), Feb. 3 (Reuters): Britain scrambled to contain its first outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu in domestic poultry today after the virus was found at a farm run by Europe’s biggest turkey producer.

Some 2,500 turkeys have died since yesterday at the Bernard Matthews farm near Lowestoft in eastern England. The department for the environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) said all 159,000 birds there would be culled over the next few days.

“We’re in new territory,” National Farmers’ Union Poultry Board chairman Charles Bourns said. “We’ve every confidence in Defra but, until we know how this disease arrived, this is a very apprehensive time for all poultry farmers.”

Defra said the virus was the same pathogenic Asian strain found last month in Hungary where an outbreak among geese on a farm prompted the slaughter of thousands of birds.

That outbreak followed a relative lull in cases of H5N1 among European poultry since hundreds of turkeys died at a farm in east France about a year ago. The strain tends to be transmitted to poultry by infected migrating wildfowl.

It has killed at least 164 people worldwide since 2003, most of them in Asia, and more than 200 million birds have died from it, or been killed to prevent its spread. But it has not yet fulfilled scientists’ worst fears by mutating into a form that could be easily transmitted between humans and possibly cause a global pandemic.