Kolkata: Laboratory tests on dead birds have proven a new outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus in West Bengal, a state government official said on Monday.
"The laboratory test in Bhopal has confirmed the presence of the H5N1 virus in the dead birds," Sridhar Ghosh, the senior official in Malda, told Reuters.
Ghosh said the virus had been found in three dead birds tested in a laboratory in Bhopal. Authorities are already culling hundreds of thousands of birds in Assam, where health authorities are also monitoring about 100 people who had shown signs of the virus.
Those patients in Guwahati, the main city in the region, were suffering from fever and respiratory infections, symptoms of the H5N1 bird flu virus in humans.
There have been no confirmed human cases of H5N1 among those patients being monitored nor at any other time in India.
But experts fear the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
Since the virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003, it has killed more than 200 people in a dozen countries, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says.
Ghosh said state officials in West Bengal were told of the latest positive tests on Monday. West Bengal officials said several hundred birds could have been found dead but disputed local media reports that as many as 5,000 birds were dead.
"We could start culling from tomorrow to contain the outbreak," Ghosh said by telephone from Malda, 350 km north of Kolkata.
The WHO has described an outbreak of bird flu in communist-ruled West Bengal last January, when more than 4 million birds were culled, as the worst ever in India.
An outbreak of bird flu in poultry was also detected in Malda in March, resulting in the culling of more than 50,000 birds.
Authorities later said in May that the virus had been stamped out in the area.
Culling operations which began in Guwahati last month had been expanded to nearby Meghalaya as a precaution, authorities said on Sunday.
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