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Ignorance of dangers hampers India bird flu fight

Reuters, Kolkata
Health workers urged villagers at the centre of a bird flu outbreak in West Bengal to stop dumping dead fowl in ponds on Friday, as ignorance about the virus hampers efforts to contain its spread.
The state, where die latest outbreak of bird flu has been reported in poultry, was to cull 400,000 chickens in a week, but officials said the task may not be completed in even a fortnight.
The virus has been detected in three districts where more than 60,000 birds have died, the agriculture ministry said.
But the ministry is also investigating suspicious bird deaths in three other districts in the state, it said in a statement, including in areas more than 300 km away from earlieroutbreaks.
The World Health Organization has described this outbreak as the most serious yet seen in India, partly because it is spread over a large area.
"It is alarming, but do not get panicked," Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, West Bengal's chief minister, told reporters.
In many of the quarantined villages, bare-chested villagers in cotton wraparounds picked dead birds with their hands and dumped them in ponds, increasing the risk of the virus spreading.
Health and veterinary staff used loudspeakers in Margram village, the epicentre of the outbreak, to ask people not to dump dead birds in ponds and watertanks and report deaths in poultry.
"People's ignorance has compounded our problems and delayed culling of birds," Anisur Rahaman, West Bengal animal resources minister, told Reuters.
Volunteers told villagers, most of them uneducated and poor, of the dangers of the virus and the precautions to be taken. At places, smiling children were seen holding up dead birds with bare hands for television cameras.
Many villagers continued to refuse to hand over their poultry to veterinary staff for culling, saying the government compensation, equal to about a dollar a bird, was not enough.
"There is a chance of contamination of water and the virus affecting other bird species," a state health official said.
This is the fourth outbreak in India since 2006. No human infection has been reported so far. Government officials believe it to be the highly contagious H5N1 strain, although final laboratory results are still pending. Scientists worry that H5N1 could mutate into a form able to pass easily between humans.
Most of West Bengal's border with Bangladesh has been sealed after the H5N1 virus spread to poultry in 25 of that country's 64 districts.
However India's animal husbandry secretary, Pradeep Kumar, said sealing borders does little to limit the disease's spread "Birds don’t observe borders," he said, before urging for greater cross-border cooperation in controlling the disease.