Bird Flu in Russia Dying Out, But May Return

MOSCOW (Reuters) - An outbreak in Russia of avian flu, a disease potentially fatal to humans, is dying out but could make a comeback next spring, a senior health official said on Friday.

"The outbreak is petering out, as migrant fowl leave the country," Ivan Rozhdestvensky, Russia's deputy chief veterinarian, told a news conference. "However, we will have to see what happens when...birds return next spring."

An agriculture ministry statement said strict quarantine was being kept at only seven localities in five regions in Siberia and the Urals out of 50 where the presence of the virus had been confirmed. Another 19 localities remain under suspicion.

Until recently bird flu cases had been limited to small private households, but the virus recently penetrated a large industrial chicken farm in the Southern Urals, killing 100,000 birds out of its population of 460,000, Rozhdestvensky said.

"This was the first case involving a large farm, and I hope it will be the last," he said. Rozhdestvensky said the remaining birds at the farm would be culled and the farm closed to prevent the disease from spreading.

He said tests were continuing to find out whether the virus discovered at the farm is of the H5N1 strain particularly dangerous to humans.

"So far we can only say that it is one of the H5 varieties," Rozhdestvensky said.

Vladimir Fisinin, president of of the Russian Poultry Breeders Union, told the briefing that since the start of the outbreak in mid-July over 12,000 wild and domestic birds have died from the disease and 144,000 have been culled.

Those figures did not include the case affecting the large chicken farm.

The H5N1 avian flu virus has infected more than 100 people, killing at least 60 in four Asian nations since late 2003. No humans have contracted the infection so far in Russia.