We analyse data from three different outbreaks of HPAI that occurred in the past 8 years in industrialised countries: an outbreak of H7N1 in Italy in 1999/2000, an outbreak of H7N7 in the Netherlands in 2003, that will be treated as two distinct outbreaks due to geographic separation, and an outbreak of H7N3 in Canada in 2004. Figure 1 shows the time course of these outbreaks. Brief details of these outbreaks are given below.