India, Bangladesh try to contain bird flu outbreak

No human cases have been reported since the latest outbreak of bird flu was first discovered earlier this week. But nearly 56,000 birds have died from the disease in eastern India, where authorities have began slaughtering another 400,000 animals, most of them chickens. In Bangladesh, officials say about 20 birds have died and another 1,700 have been slaughtered.

Bangladeshi authorities say the outbreak in that country, which has so far been limited to a single poultry farm, is the H5N1 strain of the disease. In India, where the outbreak is more widespread, authorities say they are still conducting tests to determine what strain of bird flu killed the animals.

The outbreaks are in adjacent areas of the neighboring countries.

There was also uncertainty in India on Thursday about an undetermined number of new bird deaths in areas near the center of the outbreak in a rural region in the southwestern part of India’s West Bengal state. Bangladeshi authorities were also searching for other cases of bird deaths.

While bird flu seemed to be the obvious culprit in the new deaths in West Bengal, the state’s animal husbandry minister, Anisur Rahman, cautioned the symptoms indicated Newcastle disease, known locally as Ranikhet, a fatal respiratory virus that is not known to attack humans.

“But we are not taking chances and have sent samples to laboratories for testing for bird flu,” he told The Associated Press.

Apart from slaughtering birds in areas where bird flu has been confirmed, health workers were also going door-to-door, looking for people with high fevers or breathing trouble, he said.

An outbreak of the H5N1 virus hit western India in 2006, but India declared the country bird flu-free after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of chickens. No human cases were reported. A smaller outbreak in northeastern India was contained last year.

Bird flu was first detected in Bangladesh in February 2007 at a poultry farm near the capital. Since then, authorities have slaughtered more than 300,000 chickens — including 19,000 killed during another outbreak earlier this month — at about 90 farms across the country. Nearly 360,000 eggs have been destroyed.

Bird flu has killed at least 217 people worldwide since it began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003. It remains hard for people to catch, but experts fear it will mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans, potentially sparking a pandemic. So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds.

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