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Bird flu fears commercially motivated - Russian expert

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VELIKY NOVGOROD, March 2 (RIA Novosti, Andrei Letyagin) - A senior Russian researcher said Thursday that the international campaign to address the threat of a bird flu pandemic was commercially motivated.

Oleg Kiselyov, director of the St. Petersburg-based Influenza Research Institute, told a Russian-Italian conference in the central Russian city of Veliky Novgorod: "Bird flu has become some kind of a commercial project. Panic, which has to a large extent been artificially fueled by the media, has led to an enormous increase in funds allocated for the production of vaccines in a record low period of time."

Kiselyov said that bird flu vaccines should certainly be created but that it was also very important to determine and address the sources of bird flu outbreaks. Experts have proven that the fatal human cases in China were caused by overpopulation and the uncontrolled contact between domestic and wild migrating birds in the country's water basins.

In a separate development, Russia's Agriculture Ministry said Thursday that cases of bird flu had been registered in seven regions in southern Russia, a major stopover area for migrating birds.

According to the ministry, bird flu had hit seven regions in the Southern Federal District - the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria, Daghestan, Chechnya, Kalmykia and Adygea, and the Krasnodar and Stavropol territories - as of March 1.

The ministry said earlier that about half a million birds had died from bird flu in southern Russia in February.

More than 1.3 million birds have died or been slaughtered in three outbreaks of bird flu since July 2005, or more than 44,000 every day, the ministry said. This includes more than 416,000 birds, or about 17,500 per day, that died from the virus.

No human cases of bird flu have yet been reported in Russia.

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