An outbreak of bird flu in Kazakhstan has been confirmed to be the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus that is dangerous to humans, Kazakhstan's agriculture ministry said today.
The ministry, which first reported an outbreak of avian influenza on August 4th, added that a quarantine was in place in the affected area near the village of Golubovka in northern Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region.
The region lies across the Russian border from an area where Russian officials earlier reported an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu, a strain that has killed more than 50 people in Asia since 2003.
The Kazakh and Russian outbreaks, which have so far only killed wildfowl and poultry, had sparked fears the disease could spread to humans on the Eurasian landmass and be spread further to Europe and possibly the United States by migrating birds.
But the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday it believed the Russian outbreak was subsiding and should disappear by late August.
The Kazakh farm ministry also sought to play down fears of a growing problem. Kazakhstan, a sprawling ex-Soviet state in Central Asia, is the size of western Europe but has a population of just 15 million people.
Meanwhile the number of bird deaths in a Russian bird flu outbreak jumped sharply in the past 24 hours but there were no cases of the virus spreading to humans, the Emergencies Ministry said this morning.
The ministry said in a note the total number of bird deaths jumped to 8,347 on Wednesday from 5,583 on Tuesday in an epidemic that hit Russian Siberia in mid-July.
Most deaths occurred in Russia's Omsk and Kurgan regions on the Kazakh border, the ministry said. "There have been no cases of people getting ill," it added.