Russian bird flu advances, Kazakhs say virus deadly
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A bird flu outbreak extended its reach in Russian Siberia and spread to Mongolia on Wednesday, and neighboring Kazakhstan confirmed a fowl virus found in the Central Asian state could kill humans.
Officials said no people had been infected so far, but the highly potent H5N1 strain has killed over 50 people in Asia since 2003. Outbreaks in the ex-Soviet bloc raised fears the virus could infect humans and trigger a global epidemic.
In Siberia’s Novosibirsk region, officials found the virus in another village, Novorozino, taking the total number of infected areas there to 14, Interfax news agency reported.
“Domestic birds in that village will be ... killed,” Interfax quoted a regional administration official as saying. About 35,000 birds have been killed in the Novosibirsk region to prevent the deadly virus from spreading further.
The total number of bird deaths since the epidemic hit Siberia in mid-July rose to 8,347 on Wednesday, the Emergencies Ministry said. The number on Tuesday was just over 5,580.
“There have been no cases of people getting ill,” the ministry said in a note.
In Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with Siberia, the Agriculture Ministry confirmed that the virus found in birds was the deadly H5N1 strain.
The ministry, which reported an outbreak of avian flu on Aug. 4, said a quarantine was in place in the affected area near the Golubovka village in northern Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar region.
In Mongolia, which also shares a border with Russia, nearly 80 migratory birds have died from bird flu, the first time the disease has been reported in the country, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry said most bird deaths on Tuesday and Wednesday occurred in the Omsk and Kurgan regions on the Kazakh border. Other affected Russian regions include Altai, Tyumen and Novosibirsk.
Some Russian health and veterinary officials have suggested migrating birds could export the virus as far away as the United States from Siberia.
KAZAKHS CALM
There are no known cases of H5N1 bird flu passing from one human to another, but some health officials fear that the virus could mutate and create a pandemic to rival the 40 million people killed by Spanish flu at the end of World War One.
Kazakhstan, roughly the size of Western Europe with a population of just 15 million people, sought to play down fears of a growing problem.
“The epizootic situation in (Kazakhstan’s) poultry farms is safe,” the agriculture ministry said. “As of Aug. 9 there have been no reports of new outbreaks of the disease among poultry or wildfowl in the republic.”
It added officials were testing wildfowl in the many lakes and reservoirs near the village of Golubovka. A quarantine was also in place at the village of Vinogradovka where bird flu was earlier reported and 345 poultry birds had been culled, it said.
The European Union said on Saturday it would ban imports of chicken and other poultry from Russia and Kazakhstan to help prevent the spread of the disease—a symbolic measure as there is no poultry trade between them and the EU.
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