Bird flu resurfaces in rural Japan

Japan has found a new case of bird flu in an area that has already been hit by the disease, leading authorities to prohibit the movement of more chickens.

A farm in Ibaraki, north of Tokyo, declared free of the disease in previous tests, was found to be infected. Authorities immediately banned movement of chickens and their eggs within five kilometres of the infected poultry farm.

The farm is near another chicken farm where a flu outbreak was detected in June.

Ibaraki officials had been on the verge of lifting confinement orders for chickens and eggs from that farm.

Ibaraki prefecture has already killed 158,550 birds.

Japan has been relatively spared from bird flu with only four outbreaks last year, the first cases in the archipelago since 1925.

The first case in Ibaraki was found to be H5N2, a weaker strain of bird flu than H5N1 which has killed more than 50 people in Southeast Asia since 2003.

Meanwhile, Russia thinks a bird flu outbreak in a Siberian region is a strain that has never been known to affect humans, but has taken emergency precautions just in case.

Russia's top epidemiologist says the outbreak in the Novosibirsk region announced last week was Russia's first, which has killed 1,135 farm birds.

The initial assessment has identified the outbreaks as the H5N2 strain.