Lab tests confirm Indian case of deadly bird flu

Lab tests have confirmed that at least some of the chickens that died of bird flu in western India in recent weeks were infected with the deadly H5N1 strain, the country’s first case of the disease.

Officials will immediately begin slaughtering hundreds of thousands of birds in a 1.5-mile radius around the poultry farms in the town of Navapur where the confirmed cases were detected, Anees Ahmed, the Maharashtra state minister for animal husbandry said.

“Around 500,000 birds will be killed,” he said. “It is confirmed the deaths were caused by the H5N1 strain.”

At least 30,000 chickens have died in Navapur, a major poultry-farming region in Maharashtra state, over the past two weeks, Ahmed said.

The state government was sending a team of 200 veterinarians and assistants to the area, more than 250 miles north-east of Bombay.

“We have not decided on whether to evacuate people from the area,” he said.

Officials initially believed the birds had died of Newcastle Disease, another deadly bird illness, but further tests revealed that bird flu was responsible.

Bird flu has killed 91 people since 2003, with the bulk of the victims in Asia, but recent deaths reported in Iraq and Turkey, according to the World Health Organisation. Most of the human cases of bird flu have been through direct contact with sick birds, the WHO says.

Scientists fear the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that passes easily between humans and spark a human flu pandemic.

In Navapur, poultry farmers said they were facing ruin. “Most farmers still can’t believe the news and are hoping the lab tests confirming bird flu are wrong,” said Ghulam Vhora, member of a Navapur poultry farmers’ association.

“We are looking at a very difficult future. All of us will have to start again from scratch, and I don’t know how many of us will survive,” Vhora said.

Meanwhile, health authorities warned farmers not to handle birds thought to be infected.

“Farmers are being told that if they find more than 2 to 3 chickens dying at one time, they should immediately inform authorities,” said Milind Gore, deputy director of the National Institute of Virology in the western city of Pune. He said farmers had been told to wear gloves to handle dead chickens.

Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla Ltd said a generic version of the drug Tamiflu – thought to be the best prevention against a pandemic – will be available in chemists across the country early next week.

“The drug will be available for customers by Wednesday,” Dr Yusuf Hamied, Cipla’s chairman, said. “We are geared up to produce 100,000 doses per week.”

The drug will cost rupees 1,000 (£12) for 10 capsules, compared to the current market price of around £35 – patients are advised to take two capsules a day for five days, he said.

Cipla has already begun exporting the drug, Hamied said, but declined to identify to which countries it was being sent.

Switzerland-based Roche Holding AG manufactures Tamiflu, but the drug is not patented in India.

More than 60 contries have placed orders for pandemic stocks of Tamiflu, with some buying enough to cover 40 percent of the populations, Roche said.