Bird flu outbreak in Andhra Pradesh: Burden of bird blight Premium

Bird flu outbreak in Andhra Pradesh leads to culling of thousands of chickens, impacting local economy and food supply.

The Zilla Parishad School in Badampudi village, West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, usually filled with children’s laughter and lesson chants during the day, was eerily silent on February 13. The school courtyard, where students played and chased each other during recess, is littered with fallen leaves.

The school was declared a holiday that Thursday and the premises had been made a temporary isolation centre for the official teams assigned to cull the birds from the coops contaminated by bird flu, which are less than 1 km away.

The four members of a team of experts from the Sri Venkateswara Veterinary University (SVVU) of Tirupati adjust their Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits in a classroom.

The team inspected the bird flu-affected poultry farms at Badampudi in Eluru district, Velpur in West Godavari district, and Kanuru Agraharam in East Godavari district.

Eluru District Joint Director of Animal Husbandry, T. Govindaraju, says about 1,000 PPE kits and other safety gear were provided to the 20 teams conducting the culling operation even as he guides the visiting team of experts to a poultry farm in Badampudi.

Each team is comprised of 20 workers and is supervised by a veterinary assistant surgeon (VAS), he adds.

The experts’ team quietly enters the poultry farm, where the workers and Animal Husbandry officials have been working for the past two days.