Bird Flu Besieges Southern Russia

MOSCOW — The dangerous strain of bird flu known as H5N1 has killed nearly half a million domestic fowl in southern Russia in the last month despite efforts to control the outbreak by culling poultry, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Wednesday.

About 495,000 birds in southern Russian regions near the Caspian and Black seas have died since Feb. 3 from the virulent strain of bird flu, which can also infect humans, ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said. An additional 220,000 birds were killed in an attempt to stem the outbreak, he said.

This is the third large outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Russia, but the previous episodes involved fewer deaths of sick birds. Last summer, about 17,000 birds died of the flu strain and more than 600,000 others were killed to prevent the disease’s spread, according to the ministry. During a second outbreak from October to January, about 1,500 birds died of the disease and 6,500 were culled.

Health officials fear that the virus may mutate into a form that could be easily transmitted from person to person, possibly triggering a worldwide pandemic. The larger the number of human cases resulting from contact with birds, the greater the chances for such a mutation to occur, experts say.

Birds that have been properly cooked will not spread the disease.

Since 2003, 173 people in seven countries have contracted the virus and 93 of them have died, according to a World Health Organization tally as of Monday. The first deaths were recorded in 1997 in Hong Kong. No cases of bird flu in humans have been detected in Russia.

Southern Russia is particular vulnerable to the disease because it is a major stopover point for migratory birds, which have been blamed for spreading the H5N1 strain. The most severe outbreak has been in the republic of Dagestan, on the Caspian Sea, where 595,000 birds have either died of the virus or been culled.

The Dagestan outbreak began with the death of wild swans and was spread by crows and seagulls that fed on their carcasses, Zaidin Dzhambulatov, chairman of the regional government’s veterinary committee, said in a telephone interview.

“Both the crows and the gulls fly all around, and in effect what we got was a rainfall of infected bird droppings,” he said.

At two major poultry farms, wild birds got into the main feed preparation facilities, infecting grain that was then fed to poultry, he said.

Russia will begin mass vaccinations of domestic fowl against bird flu starting March 10, Agriculture Minister Alexei V. Gordeyev said Wednesday. The country has sufficient quantities of vaccine, he said in an interview with Mayak radio.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu crossed into Western Europe for the first time in mid-February. By late in the month it had ravaged a farm of more than 11,000 turkeys at Versailleux in southeastern France.

It is unclear yet how great a danger to human health may be posed by the spread of the disease in Russian poultry farms, said Svetlana Yatsyshina, head of the virus studies group at the Russian Health Ministry’s Central Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology.

“The likelihood of human infection depends on the closeness of people’s contact with sick birds,” she said. “If it is as close as it was in some of the Asian countries, when sick animals can be in the same room as people, that ratchets up the chances of human infection.”

Viktor Maleyev, deputy director of the research institute, said that so far the worst effect of bird flu in Russia was economic.

“It’s understandable that people might be upset about killing off domestic fowl,” he said. “They might hope the birds aren’t that sick. All of this costs money.... The costs include compensation, special gear and disinfection work. There’s restriction of movement, alarm.”

Government payments to poultry owners whose flocks are killed should be boosted to discourage farmers from trying to hide birds in an effort to save them, Sergei Mironov, speaker of the Russian upper house of parliament, said Wednesday in comments reported by the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

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Natasha Yefimova of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.