Hopes for recovery of bird flu-hit poultry industry in Pakistan shattered on Sunday as the government confirmed a second outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain at a farm near Islamabad.
Scare gripped the federal capital and the already declared bird flu 'Red Alert' in the country was beefed and tightened further after the confirmation reached the public.
The Food Ministry said that the laboratory tests it conducted on samples from a small poultry farm in Sihala, a village some 15 miles from Islamabad, confirmed the presence of H5N1 strain.
Confirmation of the outbreak by World Health Organisation (WHO) was not immediately available. Animal Husbandry Commissioner at the Food Ministry, Dr Muhammad Afzal, told Business Recorder that some 3,500 chickens at the farm had been slaughtered.
Ministry officials, he said, were taking samples from nearby farms to find out if the disease had spread elsewhere.
Dr Afzal said the tests were conducted in the National Reference Lab on Bird Flu, in National Agriculture Research Centre (Narc). He added that Punjab government had reported the incident of deaths of chickens to the Ministry on the night between April 14 and 15. The Ministry then collected blood samples from the said farm for serological testing, that later confirmed the presence of H5N1 strain, the Commissioner said.
He, however, added that he was not sure whether the government would dispatch these samples to any other international lab for reconfirmation, as it did when the virus first attacked chickens in two farms in NWFP.