By Krittivas Mukherjee MUMBAI, Jan 23 (Reuters) - India, fighting a bird flu outbreak in poultry that threatens to get out of control, will build several new laboratories in a bid to combat delays in testing the virus and spur faster public health reponses. As avian influenza sweeps the country's most densely populated state of West Bengal, India's only laboratory specialising in testing bird flu is dealing with many times the number of samples it can handle. Hundreds of samples of dead birds are being sent every week to the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in the central city of Bhopal to test for what the World Health Organisation says is the worst outbreak of bird flu in India. "It has been decided to build several new laboratories especially in view of the bird flu situation now," Santanu Kumar Bandyopadhyay, India's animal husbandry commissioner told Reuters late on Tuesday. "Things are moving quickly." While the laboratory clears the backlog, veterinary workers at potentially infected areas wait for the signal to begin culling poultry, often running the risk of the virus spreading. Officials say new laboratories and research facilities are imperative in view of the rapid spread of the avian flu in the eastern state of West Bengal. To begin with, at least six laboratories are being built which will be of biosafety level-3 (BSL-3), or clinical and diagnostic facilities that work with potentially lethal agents. The new laboratories will supplement the efforts of the Bhopal laboratory. "These centres will come up at existing regional diseases diagnostic laboratories," Bandyopadhyay said. "They will be capable of handling emergencies arising out of the avian influenza virus." India's latest bird flu outbreak in poultry has killed thousands of birds in West Bengal where a massive operation is on to cull hundreds of thousands of fowl. Bird flu has spread to seven of West Bengal's 19 districts and bird deaths are being reported from new areas every day. At least 24 million people live in the affected districts, two of which have been confirmed to be infected with the deadly H5N1 strain. India has never reported any human infection, but experts fear uninformed villagers, some of whom are still eating poultry in infected zones, could contract bird flu. They say the H5N1 strain of bird flu could mutate into a form easily transmitted from human to human, leading to a pandemic. (Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Katie Nguyen)
Slaughtered chickens and ducks are displayed for sale at a market in Hanoi January 23, 2008. Bird flu may have killed a 32-year-old Vietnamese man in a northern province where the ...
