A bird flu epidemic in Russia is subsiding and should disappear by late August, a World Health Organisation official said on Tuesday. But Russian health officials were less optimistic, suggesting birds migrating from the five Siberian regions where the deadly virus has been raging since mid-July could spread the disease as far afield as the United States.
"Things are quietening down. The (epidemic) will vanish in 10-15 days," Oleg Kiselyov, head of a research institute operating under the WHO's auspices, told reporters in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.
"It won't spread further because of changing weather conditions. It's never warm enough in Siberia in late August."
The highly potent H5N1 strain, which has struck mainly in the western Siberian region of Novosibirsk, has killed over 50 people in Asia since 2003.
Outbreaks that have killed wildfowl and poultry in Russia and Kazakhstan since mid-July have raised fears the disease could spread to humans on the Eurasian land mass, sparking fears of a world-wide epidemic.
Some health officials fear that the virus could mutate into a lethal strain rivalling or even exceeding the Spanish flu pandemic that killed up to 40 million people at the end of World War One.
But Kiselyov said there was no need for such worries in Siberia. "If no one has been infected so far, people won't get infected. All the measures undertaken have helped localise the outbreak."
He added, however, that Russia would soon test and introduce a new type of vaccine to prevent humans from getting the potentially deadly virus. The first batch will be sent to the worst-hit Novosibirsk region as soon as October, he said.
In a another sign of calm, the Emergencies Ministry said that the number of deaths among domestic and wild birds was just 15 overnight compared with a total of 5,583 since mid-July.
There was no word on Tuesday on Kazakhstan, where bird flu was registered in several regions bordering Russia's Siberia.
In another Central Asian country, Uzbekistan, the agriculture ministry said it was suspending imports of poultry and eggs from Russia and Kazakhstan due to the outbreak.
The move followed similar plans by the European Union, although Brussels buys no poultry from the two ex-Soviet countries.
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