India reports bird flu outbreak in northeast

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India on Wednesday reported an outbreak of bird flu among poultry, the first since it declared itself free of the disease last August.

The government's department of animal husbandry said it had started to cull tens of thousands of birds in the northeastern state of Manipur, where 132 of 144 chickens at a small poultry farm died earlier this month.

The health ministry said it had rushed "rapid response teams" to test 450,000 people for possible symptoms of bird flu within a ten-kilometre (six-mile) radius of the infected zone in Manipur's Imphal state capital district.

Charusheela Sohony, who heads the animal husbandry department, said the infected birds died within a six-day period from July 7.

"Samples taken from the dead as well as the remaining stock are positive" for highly pathogenic H5 avian influenza, Sohony said, adding a "containment process" was underway to prevent the disease spreading.

She told reporters tests were being carried out to ascertain whether the chickens had the virulent H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

"The culling of 150,000 chickens has started in 128 poultry (farms) in a five-kilometre radius of Chingmeirong village where bird flu has been confirmed," she said.

"The disease appears to be very localised and limited presently to one unit in the state," said Sohony.

Health ministry official Vineet Chowdhury said 21 family members directly exposed to the infected chickens in Chingmeirong were being given the anti-viral drug Oseltamivir.

"So far none has showed any symptoms of infection," he said.

"We have sent 40 medical teams to survey 80,000 households in a timeframe of ten days," Chowdhury said.