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Poultry products from Moscow region farms safe to eat - watchdog

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Poultry and eggs produced at farms near Moscow are safe to eat, Russia's animal and plant health watchdog said Saturday. Rosselkhoznadzor's statement came a day after health officials confirmed avian flu as the cause of chicken and turkey deaths at two private farmsteads outside the Russian capital.

MOSCOW, February 17 (RIA Novosti) - Poultry and eggs produced at farms near Moscow are safe to eat, Russia's animal and plant health watchdog said Saturday.

Rosselkhoznadzor's statement came a day after health officials confirmed avian flu as the cause of chicken and turkey deaths at two private farmsteads outside the Russian capital.

Russia recorded its first cases of bird flu in August 2005, but until now, outbreaks have occurred only in southern provinces and in Siberia.

Gennady Onishchenko, the country's chief epidemiologist and head of the Rospotrebnadzor consumer rights watchdog, said Friday: "Vets... confirm it is the H5N1 strain." But he said "the pathogenicity of this virus for humans has not been confirmed."

He also said it was highly unlikely that the virus detected in the Domodedovo district, south of Moscow, and in the western district of Odintsovo, would spread to commercial farms. He assured that all local poultry producers "are modern and self-contained operations."

On Saturday, however, Rosselkhoznadzor Veterinary Oversight Department Head Nikolai Vlasov said tests are still ongoing and that it yet remains to be seen whether, indeed, the birds in Domodedovo and Odintsovo died of H5N1, a bird flu strain potentially lethal to humans.

"We will know exactly which strain it is by Sunday evening," Vlasov said.

He cautioned against overdramatizing the situation as all of Russia's poultry farms have been taking precautions against bird flu for two years now.

One of many measures to minimize the risk of avian flu outbreaks has been a ban for people working at poultry farms to keep birds at home, said Vlasov.

"The measures will now be toughened further, of course," he added.

In a separate development, Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry reported wild fowl deaths in the southern region of Krasnodar Saturday. It said between 100 and 1,000 dead ducks had been found in coastal areas, but that preliminary tests had detected no bird flu virus in the birds.

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