February 27, 2006

 

India reports second bird flu outbreak

 

Animal health officials have expanded the zone for slaughtering chickens in western India after the discovery of a second confirmed outbreak of bird flu, government officials said on Saturday.

 

Chickens at two farms 4 kilometres from the town of Navapur, the epicentre of the initial outbreak, were confirmed positive with the H5N1 strain of bird flu on Saturday. Confirmation of the new outbreak came two weeks after samples were taken.

 

Chawdhry said all chickens had already been killed at the two farms which were within the 10-kilometre zone where officials had finished slaughtering all farm birds after the initial confirmed outbreak

 

Officials will now widen the slaughter zone by a few kilometres and kill several thousand more backyard chickens at a few more villages, Surat district senior administrator Vatsala Vasudeva told reporters.

 

Animal health officials in Maharashtra said on Friday they must still find and kill backyard chickens in 70 villages before completing the slaughter of all birds around India's first H5N1 outbreak in Navapur, confirmed a week ago.

 

Indian officials said all 95 samples collected from people suspected of carrying bird flu tested negative.

 

Doctors have been on alert for symptoms among the 60,000 residents of Navapur and villages within 10 kilometres of the first outbreak.

 

Some 1,000 chickens have died over the weekend in two islands in the north-east state of Assam in India, prompting officials into a state of alert, local officials said.

    

Medical and veterinary teams have been rushed to the areas after reports of deaths of a large number of poultry in the area, district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Lohia said.

 

The two islands are near the 650 square km Dibru Saikhowa National Park, one of the world's 19 biodiversity hotspots.

 

Samples of the dead birds were sent to a laboratory in Bhopal in central India to find out if the chickens had died of bird flu or some other disease, Lohia said.

 

The governments in the northeastern states have banned the import of chicken and eggs from outside the region.

 

There have been no reported cases of bird flu in the northeast,but the spread of the virus in other Indian states has caused some panic in the region.

 

Elsewhere, China's Health Ministry announced two new human cases of bird flu in separate eastern provinces Sunday.

 

A nine-year-old girl and a 26-year-old woman tested positive for the deadly H5N1 virus. Both are hospitalized and in critical condition.

 

In Indonesia, laboratory tests have confirmed that a 27-year-old woman who died Monday in Jakarta had the virus. 20 people in Indonesia have died of bird flu since July.