Moscow — Russia slaughtered hundreds of fowl on Tuesday as fears grew that a bird flu outbreak in Siberia was threatening to spread to the more densely populated western part of the country.
Authorities have already killed more than 11,000 birds, the Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement, adding that measures were being taken to stop the spread of the virus among domestic fowl and to prevent human cases.
Russia's public health chief warned in a letter to regional health officials that the virus - believed to be transmitted by migratory wild birds - could nonetheless reach the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions this autumn.
And in spring next year, bird flu could spread "to the entire European part of Russia," Gennady Onishchenko wrote.
The disease has swept through poultry populations in Asia since 2003, killing tens of millions of birds and killing at least 60 people, most of them in Vietnam and Thailand.
The Russian government revealed Monday that the H5N1 strain, which can fatally infect humans and which first appeared in western Siberia in July, had spread to the Ural Mountains region of Chelyabinsk. The Ural Mountains divide the European and Asian parts of the country.
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