The Moscow Times reports:

A bird flu outbreak has killed 35,000 chickens at a Rostov region poultry farm, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Tuesday. The chickens began to die off at the Gulyai-Borisovskaya Poultry Farm last week, but experts were only able to confirm on Tuesday that they were afflicted with the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Oleg Grekov, a spokesman for the ministry's southern regional center. The highly pathogenic strain can spread to humans. "A quarantine is in place, and the appropriate services are taking the steps needed to stop the outbreak," Grekov said by telephone from Rostov-on-Don. Grekov said there were 500,000 chickens at the farm. A woman who answered the phone at the farm said she did not know about the outbreak and denied that chickens were infected with bid flu. She declined to give her name.