Russia has banned pork imports from Britain that reported 27 A/H1N1 flu cases, local media reported on Tuesday.

"We have imposed an embargo against another EU country, Britain," the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Nikolai Vlasov, deputy chief of Russia's agricultural watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor, as saying.

Russia has banned pork imports from 15 US states as well as from Spain and three provinces of Canada, which took effect at the start of May.

A spokesman for Rosselkhoznadzor said Russia will keep its ban on pork imports until all the circumstances relevant to the deadly flu virus spread have been clarified, the Interfax news agency reported.

"There are still serious grounds to believe that the virus can be passed from animals to humans--at any rate one such case was reported recently," said Alexei Alexeyenko, referring to the case reported by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The World Health Organization has officially confirmed 1,124 cases of A/H1N1 virus cases across the world.

(Xinhua News Agency May 5, 2009)