February 27, 2006

Authorities clean and disinfect farms in western India

Veterinary workers disinfected farms and cleaned up chicken coops Friday Feb 24 in a small town hit by bird flu in western India, a day after all the birds in the sprawling poultry farming region were culled.

Workers, wearing goggles, masks and protective suits, used fire-guns to scorch feathers caught in the wire netting of the coops and removed tonnes of chicken droppings and feed from under them as part of a massive clean-up drive launched in Navapur, in Maharashtra state.

The debris cleared from the poultry farms was buried in freshly dug pits which were sprayed with lime powder and other chemicals to prevent any new outbreak of the disease that killed more than 30,000 chickens before it was identified last week as H5N1 bird flu.

More than 700,000 chickens and domestic birds from poultry farms were culled before officials declared that all birds in the area had been killed. Navapur has been sealed and police barriers on the main roads prevented any vehicles from entering or leaving the town.

"We have undertaken an extensive clean up of the poultry farms now that the birds are gone. We hope to complete this exercise over the next three days," said Vijay Kumar, a state health official supervising the sanitation drive.

Elsewhere in Asia, technical adviser of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Yves Froehlich warned that the H5N1 bird flu virus is still circulating in Cambodia's countryside even though there has been no major outbreak of the disease in recent months.