Feature: Bird flu outbreaks scare residents of Kathmandu Valley
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E-mail Xinhua, August 6, 2013
Residents of Kathmandu Valley had the scare of their life after 32 outbreaks of bird flu were reported during the past 21 days since the beginning of Nepal's fiscal year on July 16.
Chicken trade, which includes sale of chicken and poultry products, has been banned in the Nepali capital for one week starting from August 1. Thousands of chickens were culled while tons of eggs and feeds were destroyed.
On Sunday, Khil Raj Regmi, chairman of Interim Election Council, the de facto Nepal government, expressed worry over the spread of bird flu in the capital and instructed his health and agriculture ministers to bring the outbreak under control.
Poultry farmers and government officials have been blaming each other for the failure to control the H5N1 virus.
"The government wants to cull all chickens, in which we have invested millions of rupees. But we are being paid only a pittance, " Jung Bahadur GC, a poultry farmer and president of Chicken Suppliers' Association, told Xinhua.
As of Monday, the government has culled more than 120,000 heads of chicken worth at least 1 million U.S. dollars in Kathmandu alone. The culling of sick chickens has been going on for the past three weeks.
The chicken farmers complained that the government paid them only one-third of their total investments.
GC blamed the government for its inadequate and slow response to the outbreak of the flu epidemic.
The government, however, said it was due to the poultry farmers and suppliers that bird flu cases increased as never seen before.
"The main reason is that the poultry farmers and suppliers did not adhere to the code of conduct that the government has imposed, " said Narayan Prasad Ghimire, a senior veterinarian at the Department of Livestock Services.
"During an outbreak, farmers have to approach us to cull their chicken and they can't bring out remaining stock to the market. They are also prohibited from hiding their infected poultry. But they are not doing this," Ghimire said.
As a precautionary measure, the government had to strengthen its quarantine checkpoint in Kathmandu Valley to prevent the entry of infected chickens from other parts of the country, said Til Chandra Bhattarai, a poultry expert.
"Infected chickens entered the capital city freely from rest of the country. This is the main reason for the spread of the epidemic," Bhattarai said.
Baltram KC, another poultry trader, said that government mechanism of confirming the bird flu has been slow, adding that there should have been on-the-spot testing and culling of infected chicken as well as destroying eggs, used feeds and excreta.
During the massive outbreak, the government did not have adequate manpower to cull the chickens, Bijay Kant Jha, director at the Livestock Services Department, admitted.
"We need extra human resources who are trained to respond to bird flu epidemic like that had happened," Jha said.
Experts further pointed out that the open border between Nepal and India has been the key source of the entry of bird flu from India.
"India reported its first bird flu case in 2006. We imported bird flu from India in 2009 due to our porous border with the southern neighbor," said Prabhakar Pathak, a former director of the Livestock Services Department.
"There is a need to strengthen our quarantine procedures in the border areas with India and ban the importation of infected chicken if we really want to control bird flu in the long run," added Pathak. Endi
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