Bird flu outbreak: 4 crows found dead at Mehsana in Gujarat, sent for lab tests

Four crows were found dead in Gujarat’s Mehsana district on Thursday, amid an alert sounded in the state in view of the bird flu cases emerging in some other parts of the country, officials said.

The crows were found dead in the premises of the famous Sun Temple in Modhera village of Mehsana.

The carcasses have been sent to a Bhopal-based laboratory to check if they died due to bird flu or some other reason, Mehsana’s animal husbandry officer Dr Bharat Desai told PTI.

“In case of the avian flu, a large number of birds die suddenly. In this case, only four have died due to unknown reasons. Even though it does not look like a case of avian influenza, we have sent the carcasses to a laboratory in Bhopal for a detailed analysis,” Desai said.

As a precautionary measure, the animal husbandry department at Mehsana has collected samples, including bird droppings and blood samples, of 50 migratory birds from the Thol lake and sent them to Bhopal for analysis, he said.

The Gujarat Animal Husbandry Department on Wednesday sounded an alert across the state to beef up surveillance and monitoring in the wake of the bird flu scare.

Four birds were found dead in Madhi village of Surat district on Wednesday, days after the death of 55 birds in Junagadh, state Animal Husbandry Minister Kunvarji Bavaliya earlier said.

The minister, however, asserted that Gujarat was still not affected by the bird flu.

Notably, the bird flu virus has been detected in some crows whose carcasses were recently found in Indore, Agar Malwa and Mandsaur districts of Madhya Pradesh, following which the state has banned the entry of chicken consignments from southern states for 10 days as a precautionary measure.

An outbreak of the avian flu has also been reported from two poultry farms in Kerala’s Kozhikode district, besides parts of Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.

The Centre on Wednesday deployed multi-disciplinary teams in bird flu-affected areas of Kerala and Haryana.

Thousands of chickens and ducks have been culled in Kerala to contain the spread of the H5N8 avian influenza strain.