January 16, 2006	Monday	Zilhaj 15, 1426

BHOPAL: The head of the laboratory that is leading India’s efforts to keep bird flu out has his hands full these days, but — rare for a civil servant in India — he still answers his own phone calls. “From day one I was involved in all this,” says H. K. Pradhan, the director of the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory, located at the end of an unpaved road behind a chaotic market in Bhopal, capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Between fielding phone calls from New Delhi about bird flu test results, which are faxed in every Monday morning, Pradhan explains to AFP how the lab works.

As a veterinary science student in the 1970s, Pradhan began working with a team of professors who felt India needed a state-of-the-art laboratory devoted to preventing the entry of foreign animal diseases into the country.

Three decades later, the lab they envisioned is responsible for testing poultry samples from around the country and from India’s four quarantine centres for bird flu each week.

A biosafety level 4 facility, where the most stringent precautions are taken to minimize the possibility of disease organisms escaping, the lab boasts of being one of just 10 such high security disease facilities in the world and the only one in Asia.

Indian scientists began to look at the possibility of having a lab along the lines of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in the United States as the side-effects of importing livestock became apparent.

“After independence, we imported a lot of animals to our country to upgrade our native animal population to increase their production,” says Pradhan.

“Unknowingly of course, we introduced about 16 animal diseases to the country.”

After decades of consultations and a construction cost of 250 million rupees (5.5 million dollars), the lab started to function in 2000.

It works mainly on developing quick and reliable methods of diagnosing exotic diseases so as to identify animals carrying those diseases and stop them from being imported.

“We have prevented the entry of three, four diseases into the country. One is bird flu,” Pradhan says. “In 2001, somebody had brought about 80 pigeons to the country. When we tested here we found (the test) was positive for bird flu. Immediately after that we requested the government to kill those pigeons and incinerate them.”

The birds tested positive for the H7 type of avian flu, which is infectious but different from the H5N1 subtype that has killed more than 70 people, most of them in Southeast Asia, since 2003.

After its re-emergence in Asia two years ago, the H5N1 strain jumped to birds in Europe in October with outbreaks in Turkey, Romania and Russia, sparking fears of a pandemic if the virus also starts being transmitted easily from person-to-person.

According to the World Health Organization, India is currently free from bird flu, but with migratory birds from affected countries like China passing through the subcontinent in the winter, officials have become more concerned about the possibility of infection and increased testing.

“In one week we test more than 1,000 (birds),” says Pradhan. “Earlier, we were testing only 1,000 in month.”

The poultry population in India is just under 500 million, according to the most recent livestock census.

The lab has developed its own stores of biological material for use in diagnosis, instead of relying on imports, and has also developed a test said to be 1,000 times more sensitive than the usual test for avian influenza.

In addition to bird flu, the

lab is working on preventing the entry of diseases such as bovine viral diarrhoea, rabbit hemorrhagic disease and African swine fever, all while making sure the diseases are contained within the walls of the lab.

Containment laboratories can be isolated by being located on an island, as the United States has done, or by surrounding the laboratory building with another building, a model used in Australia, or by separating infectious areas by floor, which is the case in Bhopal.

The most dangerous tasks, such as waste water handling and carcass disposal take place in a restricted-access basement, where a rendering plant is located.

The lab design includes steps for neutralizing the two avenues — water and air — for carrying disease agents.

“Not a drop of water can go outside without sterilization because it is potentially contaminated,” says Pradhan, “Any water from this lab or animal wing side goes through pipes and is collected and sterilized at 100 degrees centigrade (212 degrees Fahrenheit) for half an hour.”

Before entering the laboratory area, scientists shed their clothes at a shower bank, take a shower and then change into fresh clothes. Showers must also be taken on the way out, or the door will not open to allow the employee to exit back into corridor.

The air in the labs is kept under negative pressure, which means that if a door were accidentally unsealed, air would flow in the direction of the labs, but not the other way.

A huge floor above the lab contains dozens of machines that suck air out of the rooms, and then funnel it back at the correct pressure. Backup generators ensure that in the event of an outage power would return to these machines within 30 seconds — not enough time to change the level of air pressure in the rooms.

Nearby, another room with a television flips between images beamed by video cameras in the various wings, while a computer logs in every single entry or exit.

The security is necessary because the lab sometimes works with organisms that could be used for bioterrorism, as they did when testing a human anthrax vaccine developed by scientists at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.—AFP