Bird flu scare: Bhandara village under containment

Nagpur: The toll of poultry birds in Vidarbha crossed 500 on Tuesday. Poultry deaths have been reported in Nagpur, Bhandara, Yavatmal, Amravati and Akola districts. This has led to strict imposition of restrictive measures including home quarantine of poultry farm workers in Bhandara.
However, no such measures have been taken in other districts where poultry birds have died too, said senior officials in the state’s animal husbandry department.The measures are taken considering the symptoms observed at the site, said officials. In any case, no action can be taken till the results confirm bird flu, they said.
In Bhandara, orders have been issued to make Palandur the village, where 23 birds had died, a containment zone. This bars any movement in and out of the area.
Even the farm owner Dhanjay Bhusari, the workers and their close contacts have been directed to stay under home quarantine for 14 days. Sale of poultry meat and eggs has been restricted within a radius of 1km of the farm. The farm in Bhandara had 300 birds in all.
There has been no official confirmation that any of the deaths in Vidarbha are due to bird flu as reports of the tests are awaited.
On Monday, a poultry farmer in Kovdi village of Kalmeshwar Tehsil reported deaths of 265 birds in his farm of 1,200 livestock. The samples will be taken for further tests. Early on Tuesday, another 230 deaths were reported at Lingti village near Pandharkavda town of Yavatmal district. This was followed by 23 deaths reported at Palandur village of Bhandara district.
Here, a wild bird was also found and its sample will be sent for tests, said a source. In Amravati and Akola, eleven and three poultry deaths were reported respectively.
Tests will be carried out on the carcass to confirm whether these birds had died due to bird flu or any other reason.
The carcass is first sent to the state government’s laboratory in Pune to confirm the H protein of the virus after which it is sent the national institute of high security animal diseases (NISHAD) lab at Bhopal to confirm the N protein.
Explaining the process, a source said carcass are frozen state to Nagpur for east Vidarbha and Akola for west. It is further transported in ice-packs to the lab in Pune.
Awareness is also being spread on the safety of workers handling poultry. Like in case Covid-19, even poultry handlers are being advised to wear masks and gloves, said an official in the state’s animal husbandry department. This is because rather than consumption of meat or eggs, close contact with the bird leads to risk of infection, the source said.
Meanwhile, rapid response teams have been formed in each of the tehsils to carry out surveillance. The owners of birds or animals have been directed to report any incident which shows signs of the disease in their livestock.