Source: Reuters
By Sujoy Dhar KOLKATA, India, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Efforts by state authorities in east India to cull poultry to contain the latest outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus are being thwarted by poor villagers hiding their birds, officials said on Wednesday. Hundreds of veterinary workers in protective suits were only able to kill about 250 birds after they began culling operations in the Malda district of east India's West Bengal on Tuesday. They have set a target of 16,500 chickens and ducks to be killed by Thursday, with owners to be compensated by the state. "The villagers tried to hide their poultry that survived the virus," said Bishon Chowdhury, a senior local government official. "Also, many resisted because the workers arrived without spot payments for the culled birds," he said. Villagers and poultry farmers are being paid between 20 and 50 rupees (between $0.50 and $1) for each bird killed, depending on its age. Officials in West Bengal confirmed the outbreak late on Monday after tests on dead birds. Hundreds of thousands of poultry are already being culled in the northeastern state of Assam and neighbouring Meghalaya. Health workers and medical experts are also monitoring about 100 villagers in and around Guwahati city in Assam who had shown signs of the virus. There have been no human cases of H5N1 confirmed in India. VILLAGERS UPSET In West Bengal, villagers were upset about losing their poultry before the coming holiday season. "We lost all 46 birds in our poultry flock. The small compensation would not compensate for the loss in the festival season," said Kadir Fain, a poultry farmer from Norhatta in Malda. A West Bengal poultry industry official complained about a lack of preventative measures and said that losses from the culling operation would run into many millions of rupees for the state's 5 billion rupee industry. "The villagers would be worst affected besides us, since this outbreak occurred ahead of the Christmas sale season," said Sheikh Nazrul Islam, president of West Bengal Poultry Welfare Association. "The government had been lax even after an outbreak was confirmed in Assam," he said. Senior West Bengal government official Sridhar Ghosh officials said culling teams hoped to accelerate their operations on Wednesday after getting off to a slow start. Culling so far has been done within a 3 km (2 miles) radius of a village in Malda regarded as the centre of the outbreak. More than 3,500 birds have died in the area in the past 10 days. Monday's confirmation marked the third outbreak of the disease this year in West Bengal, where 4 million birds were culled in January in what the World Health Organisation (WHO) has described as India's worst-ever bird flu outbreak. In Guwahati, health workers, bird flu experts and equipment were rushed in when about 100 people began suffering fever and respiratory infections, symptoms of the H5N1 bird flu virus in humans, after the outbreak was detected there last month. Experts fear 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. There have been no human cases of H5N1 since the virus was first reported in India in Maharashtra state in 2006. According to the World Health Organisation, H5N1 flu has infected 391 people in 15 countries and killed 247 of them since the virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003.
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