A poultry farmer has died of suspected bird flu while health workers were carrying out a mass culling of birds after India was hit by the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu, officials said on Sunday.
Vatsala Vasudev, chief administrator of Surat district in western Gujarat state, said the 27-year-old farmer died on Friday.
“At this juncture, we can only suspect that the cause of his death could be bird flu. But we can confirm only after his blood report comes from the laboratory,” Vasudev told the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency.
The 27-year-old farmer was from Nandurbar district of western Maharashtra state where the bird-flu outbreak was reported, but had been shifted to Surat where he died, PTI said.
Bird flu — and its H5N1 strain that can be lethal to humans — has reached from Asia to the Middle East and central Europe and recently into Africa and several European Union countries.
Doctors in India were testing 12 people for bird flu after the virus was discovered on a farm in Nandurbar, near the border with Gujarat state, where according to officials 50 000 birds had died last week.
A government official said four people — a woman and three children — had been placed under observation, but that doctors had thus far not seen any clinical symptoms of bird flu.
“We have as a precaution gone ahead and taken human samples also, if there’s a case of fever or acute cold,” national Health Secretary P Hota told the news channel NDTV.
“Samples have been sent to the Institute of Virology. Confirmed positive or negative would be known only after three to four days.”
Officials said on Sunday a cull of more than 300 000 birds had begun in the area, which is home to both small and large farms that supply fowl to Maharashtra and Gujarat states. It is also a major egg-producing region.
On Saturday, Maharashtra’s minister for animal husbandry, Anees Ahmed, said the central government would assist in the cull.
“We are taking all precautionary measures and the central government is giving us help. We are going to destroy all the birds,” Ahmed said.
Live birds within a 3km area of the infected farm will be destroyed, while birds up to 7km beyond that zone will be vaccinated, officials said.
France
Meanwhile, France, the world’s fourth-largest poultry exporter, has lost about a third of its trade over fears about the unrelenting spread of bird flu across the globe, industry officials said.
“The situation is very difficult for the part of the poultry sector concerned with exporting chickens,” said Francis Ranc, president of a chicken export group centred in Brittany.
“There has been at least a 30% to 40% drop in poultry exports,” Ranc said at the headquarters of Tilly-Sabco, part of the Doux Group, the number-one European poultry producer that accounts for nearly all exports from France.
The H5N1 strain had been detected in a wild duck found dead in France, Europe’s top poultry producer, the agriculture ministry said on Saturday, making it the sixth European Union country to be hit.
Tests on the bird, found in the central-eastern Ain department on Monday, confirmed that it was carrying the highly pathogenic strain of the flu, the ministry said in a statement.
As a precaution, the government has ordered all poultry and tame birds to be kept indoors, to prevent possible contamination from wild birds.
Within the EU, the H5N1 virus also has been detected in the member states of Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovenia. Other European countries where the virus has been found include Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine and Russia.
Other countries
On Saturday, Iran said 135 wild swans found dead at the Caspian Sea coast have tested positive for H5N1, the first cases of the virus to be confirmed in the Islamic republic.
Indonesia confirmed its 19th death from bird flu, a 23-year-old man who worked for a chicken vendor, as the health minister vowed to boost stockpiles of the Tamiflu anti-viral drug.
The world’s fourth-most-populous nation has now reported eight fatalities from H5N1 this year alone, the highest figure globally. The virus has claimed about 90 lives, mostly in Asia, since late 2003.
The virus is spreading in Austria, affecting a swan in the capital, Vienna, and a duck in a neighbouring village, officials said on Saturday.
At the same time it has been detected in 28 more dead birds on a German island where 13 were found earlier this week, the north-eastern state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania’s agriculture minister, Till Backhaus, said.
German Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer warned on Friday that about 80 birds in all had been tested for avian influenza and more positive results could be expected.
Officials in Nigeria said on Saturday that its bird-flu crisis was slowly coming under control, 11 days after Africa’s first outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza.
“The situation is under control … if there are new challenges, we are up to it,” Nigeria’s chief veterinary officer, Junaido Maina, said. “Under the emergency preparedness plan, we have 70 investigative and diagnostic teams to go out, get and test samples from all over the country as soon as there are a high number of deaths.”
Bird flu had been confirmed in three northern states but there have been several suspected outbreaks in other states.
Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif on Saturday urged Egyptians to put an end to the use of rooftop farmyards, identified as a major health hazard since the first outbreak of avian influenza was confirmed. Four out of six birds found to have been infected by the deadly H5N1 strain in Cairo came from such installations. — AFP