Health workers trying to stamp out an outbreak of bird flu in western India struggled yesterday to convince anxious villagers that chickens bred in their backyards must be slaughtered.
Workers in pale blue protective gear had culled about 40,000 birds by late on Thursday and were busy slaughtering another 35,000 birds, said S.M. Ali, an official in the animal husbandry department of Maharashtra state, where the outbreak occurred.
Authorities were still awaiting results of tests to determine whether chickens from the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra have the H5N1 strain of the disease.
India's first outbreak last month of H5N1 bird flu was centered in large poultry farms. But the latest outbreak has hit small backyard farms, most with less than 20 chickens.
"This time it's more difficult because teams have to find out if there are chickens in people's homes. But it's being done," Ali said. "We are using local leaders to convince villagers to give up their chickens."
Health teams were also conducting checkups to rule out flu-like symptoms in villagers living in Jalgaon and surrounding areas.
Meanwhile, Malaysia's health minister yesterday denied that a poultry farmer in Perak state had been infected with bird flu in a northern state where two outbreaks of the disease were discovered in chickens and wild birds.
"I wish to stress that there have been no cases of bird flu among humans" in Malaysia, Health Minister Chua Soi Lek told reporters.
The Star newspaper reported yesterday that farmer Abdul Razak Abu Othman, whose chickens died last week from the H5N1 strain, had showed symptoms of the disease.
The paper said a local doctor had told the farmer that he had "a type of bird flu virus."
Chua said the report was incorrect, adding that no doctor could have come to that conclusion without proper diagnostic tests. And even if there was a suspicion of infection, the doctor would have hospitalized the patient for observation and informed higher authorities, he said.
The bird flu virus was confirmed on Wednesday in Abdul Razak's chickens and at an ecotourism resort about 100 km away.
In other developments, Israeli officials yesterday day ordered tens of thousands of turkeys destroyed as they awaited final word on whether the country has experienced its first outbreak of the H5N1 strain.
About 11,000 turkeys have died in recent days. Health Minister Yaakov Edri said there was a "very high chance that this is avian flu."
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