TYUMEN, April 3 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's chief doctor said Monday that pessimistic predictions regarding the spread of bird flu in the country had come true, particularly in the south, but that the worst may now have passed.
"We can say the [bird flu] pandemic has been jugulated in these [southern] regions," Gennady Onishchenko said. "Previously introduced quarantine regulations have been lifted in many villages. We also prevented people from catching the virus, although we had more than enough reasons to worry."
Onishchenko said the H5N1 strain virus had been identified in seven southern regions: the republics of Daghestan, Kalmykia, Adygea, Chechnya, and Kabardino-Balkaria, and the Stavropol and Krasnodar territories.
The potentially lethal strain of avian influenza returned to southern Russia in February, and the Krasnodar Territory was one of the worst affected regions. Officials have said over a million birds have been slaughtered in the area since last month's outbreak, but a massive vaccination campaign launched at local poultry farms in March has made it possible to prevent an epidemic.
Onishchenko said Azerbaijan, which borders on Russia's Daghestan, had officially confirmed that five out of seven people in the country who contracted bird flu had died this year.
Bird flu has been gradually returning to Russia after spending winter in Africa and in the Middle East, particularly in Turkey, Onishchenko said, where the deadly virus strain killed at least four people.
He added that the most important thing to do was to prevent people in Russia from catching the disease and to isolate poultry farms from the virus.
