Almost a year after the country was declared free of bird flu following the outbreak in Navapur and Jalgaon in Maharashtra last February, the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal and the National Institute of Virology in Pune confirmed a fresh outbreak in a backyard poultry farm near Imphal in Manipur today.

So far, according to the WHO, the virus has killed nearly 200 people worldwide while hundreds of millions of birds have been slaughtered.

As first reported by The Indian Express yesterday, the government had put all systems on alert after the labs had sent their report on samples from 132 chickens that died in a backyard poultry farm in Chingmeirong village in East Imphal district. The reports said that seven of the eight samples tested positive for bird flu.

“The tests confirm the outbreak of bird flu as they indicate that the tested samples contain the H5 strains which are highly pathogenic in nature,” Union Secretary for Dairy and Animal Husbandry Charusheel Sohoni said in the capital today. Sohoni said the disease appeared “very localized” being limited to just one unit in that village.

A health official has already checked 21 persons associated with that particular unit and no human case has been found, said a Union Health Ministry official. Around 11 people have been administered preventive doses of Tamiflu, mostly relatives of the poultry farmer whose chicken died.

A 10-bed isolation ward has been set up at the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Imphal so that human cases, if any, are quarantined there for treatment. The Government said the entire region would be kept under surveillance for the next three months before it can be declared free of bird flu.

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