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| Fresh bird flu scare in state |
| BS Reporter / Kolkata Feb 19, 2009, 22:17 IST |
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In spite of repeated attempts to check the outbreak of bird flu, the disease has once again surfaced in South Dinajpur district of the state.
The government had set a target on culling about 30,000 birds in the district in the next couple of days, said Anisur Rehman, minister for animal resources development, government of West Bengal. The repeated outbreak of bird flu in the state is on account of the inability of the Bangladesh government to check the disease, the minister said.
In this regard, the state government had also written several letters to the Union government for initiating talks with Bangladesh to control the spread of disease, he added.
The samples of dead birds from Harirampur in the district, sent to the High Security Disease Diagnostic Laboratory in Bhopal last week, contained H5N1 strain of the avian flu.
Recently, bird flu was detected in Cooch Behar district of the state.
Last year over four million birds were culled in the state, and the World Health Organization (WHO) described it as India's worst-ever bird flu outbreak.
Bird flu first broke out in India in 2006 and millions of chicken and ducks have been culled since to contain the virus, but it has resurfaced from time to time.
Hundreds of thousands of birds were also culled in the northeastern India after the virus was detected there in November.
Experts have warned that the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people across the world.
Recently, the Nepal government had issued bird flu alert in 26 districts bordering India. The disease was also reported in Sikkim last month.
Bird flu was also reported in nine provinces in Vietnam.
The minister said, the present bird flu outbreak was limited to one district, and there was not threat of the disease spreading to other areas.
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