July 26, 2007	Thursday	Rajab 10, 1428

NEW DELHI: India confirmed an outbreak of bird flu in poultry on Wednesday, the first this year, but officials said it was apparently an isolated case and were yet to verify if it was the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain.

The outbreak was located on a small farm on the outskirts of Imphal, capital of the remote Manipur state in the country's northeast, where 133 chickens out of 144 died this month.

“We have avian influenza,” Upma Chawdhry, joint secretary in the federal Animal Husbandry Department, told Reuters, adding that authorities would confirm whether it was H5N1 later.

Medical teams will check about 450,000 people in and around Imphal to see if they have coughs or fever or other bird flu symptoms.

Officials said it was a precautionary measure.

There were no suspected human cases or symptoms of bird flu among the 21 people on the poultry farm and nine veterinary personnel, all of whom were on Tamiflu. The drug is widely used to treat bird flu symptoms in people or given as a preventive.

“There is never any harm on erring on the side of caution,” Chawdhry said after a news conference. Local officials said veterinary workers would start culling chickens, ducks and other birds within a 5-km (3-mile) radius of the farm on Thursday.

About 150,000 birds would be killed over 10 days.

“It is an isolated case. No reports have come from other parts of the state,” said Dorendro Singh, director of Manipur's veterinary and animal husbandry department.—Reuters