PHOTO: PTI

theREASSURING: Members of the Poultry Welfare Association eat boiled eggs and chicken dishes in public at Shagun Square in Pimpri near Pune on Saturday.

GANDHINAGAR: After two of the dead bird samples sent to the High Security Diseases Laboratory, Bhopal, from two poultry farms in Uchhal in Surat district tested positive, the Gujarat Government issued instructions for the culling of over 68,000 fowls in the poultry farms in Uchhal taluk. Besides, a watch was mounted on 5,000-odd birds raised in the backyards of people's homes. State Animal Husbandry Department Secretary D.K. Rao said the Government received the report from Bhopal late on Friday night. The samples had been collected on February 13.

He, however, said there was still no cause for concern as no case of the presence of the disease among human beings had been reported. All the 64 human samples sent for testing had reported negative. The Government machinery swung into action and Surat District Collector Vatsala Vasudev held a high-level meeting and dispatched 75 medical teams, including doctors drawn from the Surat Medical College to Uchhal and neighbouring areas for a door-to-door survey of the human population. Teams had also been dispatched for the culling of the birds and sanitisation of the areas where the birds destroyed had been buried.

Mr. Rao said Uchhal being within a 10-km radius of Navapur, the State Government so far was taking action keeping Navapur as the centre of the avian flu as per the World Health Organisation norms and the instructions sent by the Central Government to meet the situation. The Government would now make Uchhal the centre, and in line with the WHO norms cull all the fowls within a 3-km radius, pick selective samples and keep a close watch on the poultry farms within a 10-km radius.

According to Mr. Rao, the State authorities had culled and destroyed about 90,000 birds when Navapur was believed to be the centre of the avian flu.

The Animal Husbandry Department officials had also been dispatched to other taluks in Surat district to check whether there had been any abnormal mass death of birds in the poultry farms. Even as Uchhal taluk had been declared bird flu-affected, the people rearing chickens in their backyards in Hathikhana locality in Vadodara city reported "unusual deaths" of their birds during the last 10 days or so. One of the residents, Sayeba Banoo, said she had 21 birds but 16 of them died of some "mysterious disease" during the last few days. Another resident Ayub Ghulam, said he and other residents had administered medicines to the sick birds but "nothing seems to be working."

Some Animal Husbandry Department officials visited the area but claimed that there was "no evidence" of bird flu.

The officials said the deaths to the birds could be caused by another epidemic common among the fowls known as "Ranikhet" which, however, caused no threat to the human beings.

(A PTI report from Vadodara quoted a senior government official as saying that some 25 chickens died in Hathikana due to "Ranikhet" and not bird flu.)

State Government sources, however, admitted that initially even the bird deaths in Uchhal were dismissed as "Ranikhet" casualties and the owner of one of the poultry farms, from where one of the samples had now tested positive, had started destroying his birds much before the presence of bird flu in Navapur was known and the Government issued a notification to this effect.

Mr. Rao said the State Government had so far distributed Rs. 27 lakhs as compensation to the poultry farm owners whose birds had been culled and destroyed but it had withheld the compensation to the owner of the farm who failed to report the matter to the Government before destroying his fowls.

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