Bird Flu Spreads to More Villages in Western India

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Source: News Bird flu spreads to more villages in western India More poultry samples have tested positive for H5 avian influenza in Maharashtra, which has been struggling to contain bird flu since February, officials said on Wednesday. The latest outbreak has hit 14 new villages in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, near the site of two earlier outbreaks, Maharashtra's health director T.P. Doke told Reuters. Officials said they suspected that further tests would confirm the virus was the H5N1 strain which had already struck the area. "Laboratory tests have shown it is H5, which is bird flu. We suspect it will also turn out to be H5N1 because the new outbreak is in the same area," said Uttam

Khobragade, Maharashtra's top animal husbandry official. Besides Maharashtra, the virus has struck poultry in Burhanpur district of Madhya Pradesh, close to Jalgaon. Indian authorities have sought to play down subsequent outbreaks since the first one in mid-February, saying they should not be treated as fresh cases because the new infections were being reported from an area earlier identified as a bird flu zone. "Dozens of samples from poultry had been collected after the first outbreak," said Bijay Kumar, Maharashtra's animal husbandry commissioner. "The results of those are coming out in phases." In Jalgaon, veterinary and civic workers were identifying a 10-km radius around the newly affected villages where all poultry would be culled. Health officials will also simultaneously begin a now-familiar exercise of monitoring people

for flu-like symptoms. India has culled over 500,000 birds and monitored hundreds of thousands of people to contain the spread of bird flu, but the virus has continued to strike poultry. The country has not reported the infection in humans.