Indian state government officials have said that a laboratory had confirmed the country's first outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in chickens. "Fifty-thousand birds have died. We have sent dead birds to the highest level laboratory in (the city of) Bhopal," said Anees Ahmed, minister for animal husbandry for western Maharashtra state.
"They have confirmed H5N1 bird flu" in chickens, he told AFP.
Ahmed said the outbreak was at a chicken farm containing 200,000 birds at Nandurbar near the border with Gujarat state.
India has just under 500 million heads of poultry, according to the most recent livestock census.
"We have sent in the report (on the birds) to the government," in New Delhi, H.K. Pradhan, director of the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal, told AFP.
He said federal government officials were meeting in New Delhi to discuss the report.
There was no immediate comment available from government officials.
The Bhopal laboratory is one of just 10 high security disease facilities in the world and the only one in Asia.
With migratory birds from affected countries such as China passing through the subcontinent in the winter, Indian officials have become increasingly concerned about the possibility of infection.
They recently stepped up testing of poultry farms nationwide.
Indian officials have said that in the eventuality of human-to-human transmission, bird flu would be a massive challenge for the country of more than one billion people with its underfunded health infrastructure.
Millions of people in India's rural areas live in close contact with chickens.
