ROSTOV-ON-DON, March 6 (RIA Novosti, Sergei Rudkovsky) - A suspected outbreak of bird flu has hit another region in Russia, a regional Emergency Situation Ministry official said Monday.
The official said that provisional laboratory tests of fowl that died on March 2 in the southern Astrakhan Region, home to more than a million people, had found "antibodies both of the H5 bird flu strain and Newcastle disease," which means that "birds were infected either with one virus or both of them."
Newcastle disease is an acute, highly contagious viral disease found in birds, especially poultry. The human form of the virus is not thought to be life-threatening, but symptoms include conjunctivitis.
Local health officials said that measures were being taken to prevent the disease from spreading from a village about 1,000 miles southeast of Moscow, where the dead birds had been found.
According to the ministry, with the disease now having reached the heart of Europe, almost 800,000 birds in southern Russia have died of bird flu or been culled in the last month.
"A total of 768,533 have died or been culled since February 3, including 16,287 in the last 24 hours," a ministry official said. "The authorities have been taking measures to address the epidemic."
The Agriculture Ministry said earlier that cases of bird flu had been registered in seven regions in the Southern Federal District, a major stopover area for migrating birds. Areas hit included the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria, Daghestan, Chechnya, Kalmykia and Adygea, and the Krasnodar and Stavropol territories.
Over 1.3 million birds have died or been slaughtered in three outbreaks of bird flu since July 2005, the ministry said. The figure includes more than 416,000 birds that died from the virus.
No human cases of bird flu have yet been reported in Russia.
