NAVAPUR, Feb 21: More than 200,000 chickens were slaughtered by Tuesday after India’s first outbreak of bird flu as officials admitted some failings in systems for reporting the deadly virus.

Some 150,000 birds have been killed around the small town of Navapur in western Maharashtra state where an outbreak was confirmed on Saturday, while more than 70,000 have been destroyed in neighboring Gujarat, animal husbandry joint secretary Upma Chawdhry said.

Health workers will now target domestically raised chickens, the final stage of the culling inside a three-kilometre area around the outbreak. However thousands more birds immediately outside that area, originally tagged for vaccination, will now also be killed.

“It appears the birds which were to be vaccinated are less than 100,000 so poultry farmers themselves said we would prefer to have them killed than to vaccinate,” said Chawdhry.

The outbreak has hit the industry hard with reports of chicken sales in many parts of the country nosediving. Media reports said fowl was off menus in many restaurants in New Delhi with domestic airlines and Indian railways, which also banned the sales of chicken meat and eggs at railway stations, following suit.

Chicken, usually priced between 75 and 100 rupees (1.6 to 2.2 dollars) a kilogram, was selling at 30 to 50 rupees as buyers opted for other fare.

The killings have been carried out despite opposition from farmers who dispute a government laboratory’s discovery of the H5N1 strain of the virus among samples of thousands of birds who have died in the area in the last month.

Authorities have opened a special 26-bed ward in the Navapur hospital in case of human infections. Twelve people including six children have been under observation with mild fever but no infections have been confirmed.

The national health ministry said all of them had some contact with poultry.

Five more people, three of whom had contact with poultry, were being monitored in Gujarat state where the 70,000 birds had been killed.

Two of them had been to Navapur town and were related to a man initially suspected to have died from bird flu though officials later ruled it out as the cause.

More than 90 people have died from bird flu in China, Southeast Asia, Iraq and eastern Turkey since 2003 after contracting the H5N1 virus from infected poultry.

While the virus cannot currently be passed between humans, experts fear the virus could mutate if it were to mix with common flu genes and spark a world-wide pandemic that could kill millions of people.

The government promised to carry out an internal inquiry because officials were not alerted for more than two weeks after birds started dying on January 24 around Navapur.—AFP