Navapur poultry farmers: No bird flu here

Navapur, a prosperous and sleepy small town on the northern tip of Maharashtra, had a rude awakening a week ago when some of their worst fears came true. The Bhopal government laboratory confirmed the existence of avian flu virus among the local poultry.

Local poultry farmers, however, are not ready to accept the verdict of the
High Security Alert Disease Laboratory (HSADL) of Bhopal, and are claiming that it is nothing but Ranikhet disease, which generally occurs this time of the year. To support their claim, they are citing a report of  the Maharashtra government's lab report.

Speaking to Business Standard, a local farm owner Ismail Hazari said: "Take the samples of our birds. If you find they contain avian flu virus, kill our birds. We have no objection. In fact, we will do it on our own, but why is the government hell bent on destroying our years of toil?

He added: "There are around 52 farms here. They are killing all the birds in all the farms on the basis of samples from two farms. How justified is that?"

Meanwhile, the government's efforts to cull the birds are acquiring humourous proportions. During the culling process at a farm called Khalil farm, birds were given an anesthesiatic and stuffed in gunny bags. These gunny bags were then thrown into the dumps, but the drugged chicken desperately tried to get out of the bags.

The animal husbandry department teams then physically killed the birds that managed to get out of the bags, and again stuffed them into the same
gunny bags with live chicken.

"We are just not finding enough labourers to cull the birds," a senior official from the animal husbandry department said. "Labourers from the farms are not co-operating with us, and we have to cull the birds with our limited manpower," he added.

Dr M V Mundhe, district civil surgeon, said: "There are six suspected patients in the hospital. They have been kept under observation and their blood samples have been sent to the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune but nothing has been confirmed yet."

He further said that government has formed 33 teams of three persons each to go to all the villages and carry ut door-to-door survey but no suspected cases have been found in any of the villages so far.

Our Pune Bureau adds: The National Institute of Virology (NIV) here has received human samples to test for the diease. NIV's director Dr A. C Mishra or his senior researcher colleagues were not available for comment.

Sources in the institute's office said the samples are under examination,
but any results can be expected only after three days.