Culling won't work

The resurgence of the dreaded bird flu in West Bengal, barely a month after the state government claimed to have controlled it, is not at all a surprise, considering the ham-handed manner in which the culling and other disease-containment measures were handled when it first struck in January. The fear that thousands of potentially dangerous birds, carrying a latent infection of the highly contagious H5N1 avian influenza virus, had remained left out of the culling drive, has now come true. Indeed, the infection may have travelled to new and even distant places, as the necessary post-outbreak bio-safety curbs and movement restrictions have not been observed. Under the circumstances, fresh eruptions of the disease can be expected at any time and from anywhere in and around West Bengal and even further afield. The likely presence of infection carriers among wild and backyard birds, where they also come in contact with other animals and people, multiplies the risk of the virus mutating into a form transmittable to humans.

It is shocking, therefore, that the state government has learnt no lessons from the previous fiasco and has again resorted to culling operations in the Raghunathganj-II and Jiaganj blocks of the Murshidabad district, as the chief disease control measure. What seems to have not been realised by it "" and even by the Centre "" is that the game plan that failed last time is unlikely to succeed this time for several obvious, yet overlooked, reasons. For one, the failure of the earlier culling drive was the result chiefly of lack of prompt and adequate compensation, which prompted people to hide their birds. And ducks, which can carry the infection for a longer period without displaying its symptoms, usually dwell in ponds and, therefore, tend to escape the attention of culling teams. Nothing has changed this time to instill confidence in the success of the bird flu control and containment drive. In any case, the fact that the infection is not among caged birds, which are easy to tackle, but is in free-range and wild birds, makes it virtually impossible to achieve 100 per cent results when it comes to destroying the birds.

The correct solution lies in preventive and curative vaccination to control the spread of the virus. This approach, strongly commended by poultry experts, offers a cost-effective option to deal with the situation without having to pay any compensation. This approach has the additional advantage that people, instead of hiding their birds, would willingly offer them for vaccination in order to save them from the disease. Of course, vaccination will require a repeat dose and regular monitoring, but these would be cheaper and easier to carry out than the destruction and safe disposal of all birds. Also needed is zoning of the country into disease-affected and disease-free regions, so that in the case of a localised infection, the entire poultry sector does not suffer. Under such an arrangement, poultry production, consumption, trade and export would remain undisrupted in the disease-free zones. Both the Centre and West Bengal should re-visit the bird flu strategy and replace it with an effective and practical approach, so as to keep this menace at bay.