During the meeting, Italy and Greece repeated earlier demands that the commission help support businesses in countries where farmers have been severely affected by falling poultry prices, with France later joining in such a demand, media reports say.

Since the discovery of the lethal H5N1 virus in wild birds started to be reported on a nearly daily basis, poultry sales have dropped by 70 percent in Italy, 40 to 50 percent in Greece and 15 percent in France.

Ms Fisher Boel said however that the commission did not plan to offer any community aid, as there was no provision for such a move in the existing EU regulations.

However, should the EU situation with bird flu deteriorate further, extra measures could still be examined, she indicated, leaving a door open for a later revision of the community capacity to help poultry farmers.

Current EU law provides for compensation for farmers who are forced to slaughter poultry in the event of an animal disease outbreak, but does not cover loss of income due to poor sales.

The lethal H5N1 virus has so far been found in six EU member states: Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovenia.

Vaccination can conceal disease

Meanwhile, an initiative for immediate "preventive vaccination" against bird flu seems to have divided member states trying to find out how to tackle the virus' spread.

European veterinary experts are due to discuss vaccination at a special meeting on Tuesday (21 February) in Brussels and EU health ministers will hold a meeting in Vienna later this week.

France and the Netherlands have asked the EU for permission to start the mass vaccination procedures on some of their farms.

But the controversial vaccination proposal - which risks costing farmers their export markets – was met with scepticism from other EU member states.

Germany, Austria, Denmark and Portugal have announced that vaccinating poultry might make it difficult to distinguish between birds who have the virus and those that have been vaccinated.

Some EU member states also fear the "logistical problems" of delivering the vaccine to large numbers of birds and the "ongoing cost" of overseeing vaccinated flocks, with vaccines needing to be reintroduced every six months.

Meanwhile the whole northeast German region of Vorpommern was declared an emergency area on Monday, with authorities having already found the deadly H5N1 virus in 81 birds in the area.