Authorities in an eastern Indian state will start culling thousands of chickens and ducks on Sunday to try to contain a fresh outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, officials said. West Bengal officials said they would begin killing poultry in two villages in the densely populated state's Cooch Behar district bordering Bangladesh, after dead bird samples tested positive for bird flu.
Birds had been dying in the area for the past week. "We would engage 30 teams to cull about 45,000 chickens and ducks in the region," Rajesh Sinha, a senior government official, told Reuters by phone. "There is no report of any villager in the region falling sick."
The latest outbreak of the virus in poultry is the sixth since 2007 in West Bengal, where over four million birds were culled early last year in what the World Health Organisation described as India's worst-ever bird flu outbreak. India has reported no human infections. Bird flu first broke out in India in 2006 and millions of chicken and ducks have been culled since to contain the virus, but it has resurfaced from time to time.
Hundreds of thousands of birds were also culled in India's north-east after the virus was detected there in November. Experts have warned that the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people across the world.
Since the virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003 it has infected about 400 people world-wide and killed over 250 of them, according to WHO data released earlier this month. China's official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday a 21-year-old woman had caught the H5N1 strain of bird flu in central Hunan Province but was recovering in hospital. Authorities said a young man died of the strain of bird flu in China's south-western region of Guangxi, the country's fifth reported death from the disease this month.
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