ROME (AP) – Italian veterinary and health officials gathered Sunday to plan a response to the country’s first confirmed cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, which was discovered in wild swans in southern Italy.

The cases in Italy and others confirmed in northern Greece on Saturday marked the first time the highly infectious strain of the H5N1 virus had been detected within the European Union.

Authorities said the outbreak posed no immediate threat to humans because only wild birds had been infected.

Italy committed itself to a series of precautionary measures ,including the creation of a three-kilometre, (two-mile) high-risk, protection zone around each outbreak area, and a surveillance zone of an additional seven kilometers (four miles).

“We’ve adopted the first measures, and the protection of the affected area is already under way,” the health assessor for Puglia, Alberto Tedesco, told reporters as he arrived for the meeting.

Bird flu has killed at least 88 people in Asia and Turkey since 2003, according to the World Health Organization in a Feb. 9 update. Yesterday, a WHO-sanctioned laboratory confirmed another two deaths in Indonesia. It has been ravaging poultry stocks across Asia since 2003, killing or forcing the slaughter of more than 140 million birds.

Almost all the human deaths have been linked to contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans, possibly sparking a human flu pandemic that could kill millions.