The second outbreak, at Ter Aar, 15 miles from Hekendorp where the disease was identified last Friday, is on a chicken farm in the South of the country.

The Dutch government has confirmed that 43,000 birds at the site will be slaughtered and has banned movement of poultry and poultry products (the rules also apply to other animals on mixed farms). It has not been confirmed whether the strain is the same (H5N8) as has been discovered elsewhere in northern Europe over the past few days.

Birds on the four other poultry farms in a 10km zone around Ter Aar will also be tested for infection, the Dutch agriculture ministry said in a statement.

Before the first case in the Netherlands was reported last week, a farm in East Germany was also found to have been infected on 4th November. German officials have said that none of the tests on birds in the surrounding area (over 3,000 of them) yielded any positive results. This included tests on wild birds including swans and ducks.

When a case of H5N8 flu, which is highly contagious between birds, was identified in Yorkshire over the weekend, the EU Commission suggested that the seemingly unrelated outbreaks must have been caused by migrating birds.  

On Wednesday, Ukraine suspended imports of poultry from the UK in response to the outbreak in Yorkshire.