Flew Over The Fence

The official message—that chicken is safe so long as you cook it at over 70 degrees—fell on deaf ears. And India’s poultry industry took a nosedive. As poultry sales plummeted and worries about infected chicken impacted hotel and restaurant businesses nationwide, the government found itself fighting a pandemic of fear. But if reports from ground zero—Navapur tehsil in northern Maharashtra’s Nandurbar district—are to be believed, it is the real health pandemic and its containment that the government should be worrying about more. In the event of more bird flu outbreaks—or worse, a human outbreak—the government will have not just an economic blowout but also a major health crisis on its hands.

After Bhopal’s High Security Animal Disease Laboratory confirmed that Nandurbar’s bird deaths were caused by the deadly H5N1 virus, the Centre sent in 60 rapid response teams to cull all birds within the 3-km-radius "infected zone", and to detect suspected human cases. Beyond the infected zone but within the 10-km-radius "surveillance zone", all birds were to be vaccinated. The poultry markets on ground zero were shut down; and about 4,000 sets of personal protective equipment (PPE) and 2,000 cycles of Tamiflu vaccine were sent to Nandurbar.

So far so good. By midweek, the culling of almost 3 lakh birds in Maharashtra and neighbouring Gujarat, and the destruction of nearly 6 lakh eggs, came to a close. But there were reports of slip-ups: of birds crawling out of shallow graves, of hasty burial of birds. Clearly, these ignored the Centre’s prescription that carcasses be burnt, else buried in lime-covered pits at least two metres deep. Also, the demarcation of a 3-km-radius infection zone and a 10-km-radius surveillance zone turned out to be farcical: close to 30,000 bus passengers, not to mention journalists and officials, moved unprotected between infected and non-infected areas before Navapur was quarantined, three days too late, by Wednesday. While the government’s own contingency plan for avian influenza prescribes PPE for cullers and farm workers, there was an acute shortage of it at ground zero, where farm workers culled hens with their bare hands. And even though suspected human cases should be strictly quarantined, it was reported that two patients under observation in the isolation ward simply walked home.

So, even as Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar was claiming that the bird flu outbreak had been contained, faux pas such as these did not inspire confidence among poultry consumers. In Bombay, sales of poultry dishes fell by 90-95 per cent, according to Chandrahas Shetty, president of Bombay’s Association of Hotels and Restaurants. The scenario was the same in cities across the country. At South Delhi’s Rajinder da Dhaba, a mecca for tandoori chicken lovers, sales fell by 96 per cent—from 350 chickens a day to just 15. Most national hotel chains took chicken, eggs and mayonnaise off their menus. As panic spread, travel agents, hotels and airlines waited in trepidation, wondering if large-scale tourist cancellations would follow.

By February 22, India, which is the world’s fifth largest producer of eggs and the ninth largest producer of broiler chickens, had pegged the poultry industry’s losses at close to Rs 1,100 crore for just the first three days after the bird flu outbreak was announced. The market leader, Andhra Pradesh, together with Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Punjab, accounts for nearly half of India’s poultry production. In Andhra Pradesh alone, Black Sunday (February 19) has caused a Rs 10-crore loss to poultry farmers, says Poultry Federation president K. Narayan Reddy. The industry was losing between Rs 5 crore to Rs 6 crore daily, as of February 21, with sales falling by 50-60 per cent. In Bombay, where the poultry business was the worst affected, only 17,500 birds came in to the city on Tuesday against a normal daily average of one lakh birds; wholesale prices crashed to nearly half. In Tamil Nadu, which is a major exporter, sales fell by 30-40 per cent. The picture for north India was also dismal. "We are sending our chicken to supermarkets and stocking it in our shops. But no one is buying any," says Zafar, a leading poultry supplier to the capital. On Friday, he sold 1,000 birds, on Monday a mere 100. The transport industry lost Rs 200 crore in four days, with trucks that are used for carrying poultry and eggs standing idle.

Poultry stocks, too, took a beating. Venkateshwara Hatcheries’ stock shed 12 per cent from its close on Friday to its close on Tuesday evening, while stocks of Srinivas Hatcheries lost 9.6 per cent. Seven countries—including Japan which has cancelled a Rs 7-crore order—have banned imports from India. "This is the biggest crisis we have ever faced," said Shashi Kapoor, president of the Poultry Federation of India.

Since 2003, the poultry industry worldwide has been hard-hit by the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus with a mortality rate in chickens of near 100 per cent. After H5N1 first emerged in lethal form in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six people and leading to the culling of 15 lakh chickens, fear of avian flu has brought down poultry stocks in every country that has recorded outbreaks. The virus has spread rapidly to chicken populations in Thailand, Vietnam and China, among other countries, despite the death or destruction of an estimated 150 million birds. In the last few years, health experts have been repeatedly warning of a pandemic of bird flu.

The Navapur poultry belt, close to Maharashtra’s border with Gujarat, has about 15 lakh layer (egg-laying) birds. These form just one per cent of India’s 15 crore layer birds. Which is why, points out Kapoor, "the most important thing is to prevent the spread of the disease in order to protect the poultry industry and a ripple effect on other industries."

While Kapoor and his counterparts worry about the economic fallout of avian flu, what alarms biologists is the geographical spread of H5N1 in the last few months beyond Southeast Asia to Russia, Turkey, parts of Europe and Africa, and now, India. It’s been travelling primarily along migratory flyways or along poultry trade-routes. Globally, public health experts have one more reason to worry that the world is heading inexorably closer to an influenza pandemic.

"India is the worst place for an outbreak," avers Stephen Aldrich, director of Bio-Era, a Massachusetts-based research and advisory firm, on the implications of an influenza pandemic. "It has high-density population, plenty of backyard poultry farming and a poor public-health system. This is very bad news."

H5N1 is the deadliest of 144 known strains of the Influenza A virus, most of which have existed in harmless form in wild waterfowl for centuries. It was probably introduced to local poultry, in low-pathogenic form, by migratory birds, and mutated in crowded poultry-rearing conditions to become highly pathogenic. The virus spreads to humans through physical contact with infected birds and their excreta, and has a high fatality rate. But international health experts warn it could become easily transmissible. As a new study unveiled at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos noted, "If the avian flu H5N1 virus mutates to enable human-to-human transmission, it may disrupt our global society and economy in an unprecedented way."

That explains why the health ministry developed an avian influenza contingency plan last November, at the start of the migratory season. It sought a reporting system that could mobilise poultry farmers, village workers and the entire machinery of state animal husbandry departments to report on unusual bird deaths.

In a similar operation in November 2004, the Thai government mobilised 750,000 volunteers to alert authorities on the early signs of bird flu in return for free health benefits for their families. However, in contrast to the highly successful Thai model, India’s vigilance model failed: locals say chickens were dying in Navapur as early as January 26, but that they were buried clandestinely or, worse, sold. A senior official of the animal husbandry department admitted delay in surveillance—bird flu was confirmed only 25 days after chickens started dying. In the absence of any grassroots awareness of bird flu, the poultry farmers possibly mistook it for Ranikhet—a disease with similar symptoms—or covered up the deaths to protect the industry.

The Indian poultry industry has been burnt by avian flu before—or rather, the fear of it. When the global scare about avian flu was at its peak in February 2004, India banned imports of poultry products, spreading panic and leading to losses of more than Rs 1,200 crore for the poultry industry. Thousands of small poultry farmers were wiped out, and have still not been able to restart business.

"Last time it was only a scare, still the losses were immense. So, this time we are worried that it could be worse," says Amit Sachdev, a poultry expert with Blue Cross Consultants. Very few farmers have insurance cover, even then bird flu isn’t covered. "Many farmers don’t have money to buy new stock and get back into business," he says.It is no surprise then that the poultry industry went into defensive overdrive; farmers stopped cullers from entering their farms. Local Shiv Sena activists politicised the situation by claiming that the mostly Muslim poultry farmers had already trucked the sick chickens out for sale. And majors like Venkateshwara Hatcheries were still asking for fresh tests to confirm that it was bird flu, not Ranikhet.

So how did H5N1 come to Nandurbar? The migratory birds theory is a possibility, but it has also been met with scepticism. "There is no flyway over this region and the outbreak took place at the end of the migratory season," said Shripad Kulkarni, spokesman for the Bombay Natural History Society, which sent experts to 26 wetlands during the migratory season to monitor unusual bird falls.

It is also possible that unorganised poultry practices made it easy for an infected bird to change hands. "Small farmers work with just 100 to 200 birds," said A.K. Prasad, chairman of the Influenza Foundation of India. "If something dies, they try to sell it off, or cook it and eat it. It is quite possible that an infected chicken got into Nandurbar this way."

Perhaps it was imported poultry used for breeding purposes that brought the infection; or maybe it was imported bird feed, 10 per cent of which is made of meat and bone meal. While the jury is still out on this, the implications are alarming. Worldwide, H5N1 has killed 92 people till date. "Every new human infection gives the virus another opportunity to become more easily transmissible among humans," warns Aldrich. The last century saw three major influenza pandemics which claimed more than 43 million lives.

If a pandemic does unfold, there is no assured cure. A five-day course of Oseltamivir (commercially known as Tamiflu) might reduce the severity of the illness, but it must be taken within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms; and supply is scarce. Vaccines for seasonal influenza cannot be used in the event of a pandemic; and large-scale production of an appropriate vaccine cannot be undertaken till that new virus has emerged. In the interim, containment is the only solution. "Safe culling, destruction and disposal are the cornerstones of containment," points out Prasad.

But going by the government’s performance in Navapur, further outbreaks can’t be ruled out. "There will be leaks," warns Prasad. "And there will be human cases. I am sure of that." As of now, all but one of the 95 human samples sent for testing have proved negative. Still, there’s no reason for complacency.

By Saumya Roy and Payal Kapadia in Mumbai with Anuradha Raman in Delhi with inputs from Madhavi Tata in Hyderabad, and S. Anand in Chennai