Agencies
Bhubaneshwar, Dec 17: Orissa has imposed a ban on the inflow of poultry from neighbouring states following the confirmation of the presence of H5N1 bird flu virus in West Bengal, an official said on Tuesday.
"We have banned the import of poultry birds and poultry products from neighbouring states, including West Bengal and Jharkhand," Bishnupada Sethi, director of the fisheries and animal resource development department, said.
He said the state government had collected blood samples from thousands of birds from various parts of the state but all of them tested negative for bird flu.
“We have asked the collectors of at least eight districts located in the border regions to remain alert,” Sethi said, adding that "instructions have also been given to men at all check posts to examine vehicles passing through their gates to ensure no poultry enters the state”.
The West Bengal government on Monday said strains of the dreaded avian flu virus were detected by the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory at Bhopal in blood samples collected from two dead poultry birds in Malda district.
It was the second outbreak of bird flu in India's West Bengal state and came as several thousand birds have been slaughtered in the neighbouring state of Assam, where authorities have been battling an outbreak for several weeks.
Tests from samples taken from the village of Lorhata, some 220 miles (354 kilometers) northeast of Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, showed the presence of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Sirthar Kumar Ghosh, a local official.
Ghosh said authorities will begin slaughtering birds on Tuesday. Some 3,500 birds have died in Lorhata in recent days.
India has contained several previous outbreaks of the disease, including in West Bengal in January, when they slaughtered some 4 million birds.
No humans in India are known to have caught the disease, which has killed at least 246 people worldwide according to the World Health Organization. Bird flu remains difficult for humans to catch, but experts fear the virus might mutate into a new form that spreads easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic.