Culling won`t work

  • 13/03/2008

  • Business Standard

The resurgence of the dreaded bird flu in West Bengal, barely a month after the state government claimed to have controlled it, is not at all a surprise, considering the ham-handed manner in which the culling and other disease-containment measures were handled when it first struck in January. The fear that thousands of potentially dangerous birds, carrying a latent infection of the highly contagious H5N1 avian influenza virus, had remained left out of the culling drive, has now come true. Indeed, the infection may have travelled to new and even distant places, as the necessary post-outbreak bio-safety curbs and movement restrictions have not been observed. Under the circumstances, fresh eruptions of the disease can be expected at any time and from anywhere in and around West Bengal and even further afield. The likely presence of infection carriers among wild and backyard birds, where they also come in contact with other animals and people, multiplies the risk of the virus mutating into a form transmittable to humans. It is shocking, therefore, that the state government has learnt no lessons from the previous fiasco and has again resorted to culling operations in the Raghunathganj-II and Jiaganj blocks of the Murshidabad district, as the chief disease control measure. What seems to have not been realised by it