India, Europe Try To Contain Bird Flu

(CBS/AP)  Indian health officials went door-to-door Monday searching for people possibly sickened by the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, while hundreds of German troops disposed of dead chickens in a desperate attempt to contain the fast-moving disease.

The European Union's agriculture ministers, meanwhile, met to discuss ways to combat bird flu — such as vaccinating poultry — as the H5N1 strain spread to a half dozen EU nations.

The European Union's top poultry producer, France, is among those grappling with its first reported case of bird flu, and the continent's chicken farmers said consumption has fallen, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. And nearly 250 German troops cleared away dead birds from the Baltic island of Ruegen, where the country's first cases of the disease were confirmed in wild birds last week. Tornado jets flew overhead.

With a mass slaughtering in India entering its second day, plumes of black smoke filled the air in parts of now-deserted poultry farms Monday around Navapur, more than 250 miles northeast of Bombay, as farmers burned their dead chickens.

Heavy earth movers also dug deep pits at some poultry farms. Workers have already dumped more than 200,000 bird carcasses along with the gloves, goggles and blue gowns used by health teams. The pits were coated with chemicals, including disinfectant, before being filled in.

In related developments:

Meanwhile, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said it has signed a pact with Laos to support a three-year program to combat bird flu, the Laotian state news agency KPL reported Monday. The $2.9 million agreement is aimed at strengthening "legal and regulatory frameworks, veterinary capacity, and disease control and surveillance systems," as well as public awareness of the disease in cities and the countryside, it said.

Forty chickens died in Malaysia last week of the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu, the first reported cases of the virus in the country in a year, the government announced Monday. However, the death of the chickens in an area near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's main city, was an isolated case, and there were no human deaths, Agriculture Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said in a statement released through the national news agency Bernama. "Tests conducted at the Veterinary Laboratory in Petaling Jaya and at the Livestock Research Institute in Ipoh confirmed the death of the ... chickens was caused by H5N1 avian influenza virus," he said.

German authorities deployed the first 40 troops on Sunday and ordered a cull of poultry on the island of Ruegen, where the country's first cases of the deadly H5N1 case of bird flu were confirmed in wild birds last week. Now it has deployed an additional 250 troops to help clear away dead birds from a Baltic Sea coastal region.

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand urged consumers Monday to stay calm and keep eating poultry in response to France's first case of bird flu, and said the government would spend whatever money is necessary to fight the virus. The French health minister tells Associated Press Television News his government has set aside nearly 870 million dollars to fight the disease. And he says "there will be no financial obstacle" to preparing for the flu. He says people should stay calm and keep eating poultry.

Ecologists in Azerbaijan have found many dead birds on the Apsheron Peninsula and other regions in the former Soviet republic in the Caucasus. It's not known what they died from. "Tests will be made on these birds. If you look at the birds they don't seem to have died of avian influenza, but probably for other reasons, like cold," Juihun Gasanov, Head of Monitoring, Ecology Ministry said.

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