More than 10,000 head of poultry were slaughtered in seven districts of India's eastern West Bengal state in the past 24 hours as local authorities stepped up efforts to contain the latest outbreak of avian influenza, officials said.
More than 85,000 of a target of over 400,000 birds had been culled in Birbhum and West Dinajpur districts of West Bengal where samples of dead birds had tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain, a federal Ministry of Agriculture release said.
Samples from three more districts - Murshidabad, Nadia and Burdwan - had also tested positive, the release said. Another 52 samples of chicken, ducks, pigeons and crows from several districts were being tested at a high-security state-run laboratory in the central Indian city of Bhopal.
West Bengal's Animal Resources Minister Anisur Rehman said the situation had shown overall improvement and culling operations would be intensified from Sunday with the number of rapid action teams being increased from 85 to 300, PTI news agency reported.
Rehman said a sum of 30 million rupees (about 765,306 dollars) had been set aside as compensation for farmers losing their birds and they were being handed tokens and asked to contact their local government offices for the funds. Local media reports had earlier said that the reluctance of farmers to kill their birds was hampering culling operations.
Meanwhile, a team of federal Forest Department officials was scheduled to fly to West Bengal later Saturday to study the health and behaviour of migratory birds. India's West Bengal state borders Bangladesh which has reported a major outbreak of avian influenza.
Federal Agriculture and Food Minister Sharad Pawar said paramilitary forces guarding the border would be alerted to keep a close eye on the movement of birds from Bangladesh. He also said as the disease was spreading, culling would be carried out wherever the death of large numbers of birds were reported without waiting for confirmation of the presence of the bird flu virus from the Bhopal laboratory.
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