Altogether eight panchayat areas under the Kamalpur sub-division in Dhalai district of Tripura have reported deaths of thousands of fowls on Monday in the past two weeks, with samples sent to Bhopal testing positive on Monday.

Dhalai district shares an international boundary with the Maulabibazar district of Bangladesh, which is one of the 29 districts in the country to have been badly affected by avian flu in the past few months. Sources in Agartala said a team of three officials from the Union Health Ministry and one from the Union Agriculture Ministry met Chief Minister Manik Sarkar today evening and briefed him on the outbreak and the steps required to be taken to control it.

The Government has dispatched a team of 100 people trained in bird culling to Kamalpur, where the killing of the fowl will begin tomorrow morning. Around 25,000 birds may be killed in the eight gram panchayat areas. The administration has also kept 200 teams ready for culling and procured the anti-flu virus from Delhi.

A red alert has been sounded to prohibit import of poultry from outside the state, including Bangladesh, which shares a 856-km-long porous border with Tripura. BSF personnel and special surveillance teams are keeping a close watch in the border areas.

After 3,000 birds died in the space of a fortnight, the state government had sent samples of the dead poultry to the high-security Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory in Bhopal on Thursday. Preliminary reports which came yesterday indicated that the birds died of bird flu.

The reports of a fresh outbreak are a setback to the Government’s efforts to ensure that the virus didn’t spread to new areas. It’s been two months since the first case was reported in West Bengal and culling of birds is still continuing.

Last year, there was a bird flu outbreak in Manipur. The country’s first brush with the virus was in 2006, when a large number of birds were infected in Maharashtra.