250 wild birds dead in Aurangabad village

Over 250 wild birds have died in Gandheri village, about 30 kilometres from Aurangabad, since Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, villager...

Over 250 wild birds have died in Gandheri village, about 30 kilometres from Aurangabad, since Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, villagers spotted the dead birds and alerted the district authorities. The Deputy Commissioner and district animal husbandry officer led a team of officials to the village and collected blood and tissue samples from the dead birds. The samples have been sent to the High Security Disease Laboratory in Bhopal. ‘‘The team is keeping a watch on all birds in the adjoining areas,’’ said Joint Commissioner Dr B K Jondhale of the Animal Husbandry Department from Aurangabad. Jondhale added that the dead birds showed signs of pneumonia. He ruled out the possibility of them being migratory birds. ‘‘They are definitely not migratory birds, they are all resident wild birds,’’ he said.

All farms required to get disease-free certification

New Delhi: With the culling of poultry over in the affected parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat, the Animal Husbandry Department has written to all the state chief secretaries to start ‘‘more active’’ surveillance—the states have been asked to get no-disease certificates from all the farms in the country. The directive has been issued after reports from Navapur which suggest that the disease went unnoticed for weeks. ‘‘We don’t want to waste time. This will be a major step in containing the disease in the country,’’ said Dr SK Bandopadhyay, Commissioner Animal Husbandry.

Venkateshwara, Intervet spar over vaccine

PUNE: Joining the war of words between Venkateshwara Hatcheries and the government in the bird flu case, global vaccine-maker Intervet India Pvt Ltd—a business unit of the 13 billion euro firm Akzo Nobel—on Thursday took on the National Egg Co-ordination Committee and the VH Group by calling their statements ‘untrue.’ Soon after the government declared that the samples from Navapur in Nandurbar district had tested positive for bird flu, the NECC alleged in a statement that ‘‘multinational vaccine manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies, eager to sell their anti-flu drugs in India, are trying to project it as a case of bird flu.’’