Russian bird flu advances, Kazakhs say virus deadly

By Raushan Nurshayeva and Maria Golovnina

ASTANA/MOSCOW (Reuters) – 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.

(additional reporting by Nick Macfie in Beijing) reuters
mg/jwt