Kathmandu (AsiaNews) Nepal has banned chicken imports from India after a bird flu outbreak was reported in the western state of Maharashtra, but monitoring a 1,700-kilometre border won't be an easy task.
Dala Ram Pradhan, director general of Nepal's Department of Livestock Services, told Asianews that the ban includes all poultry products from India and will last until the World Health Organisation does not certify an end to the outbreak in that country.
Nepal has already banned import of poultry products from Thailand, Germany, Indonesia and some other countries.
Pradhan said that in Nepal "laboratories have been testing samples regularly; no bird flu virus has been found. Still, we have to be vigilant".
"Nepal is at risk for the avian influenza even though no single case has been detected so far," said Dr Margarita Ronderos, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization in Kathmandu. "High-risk areas are under surveillance for possible human cases".
Even Anjani Thapa, an expert at the Epidemiology and Disease Control Division of the Ministry of Health and Population, told Asianews that although a recently concluded conference of epidemiologists in Beijing found that Nepal was a "low-risk" country, the "outbreak of bird flu in neighbouring India has made it high-risk since most of its poultry, 80 per cent, is imported from there, especially from Maharashtra. "
The border dividing the two countries runs for 1,700 kilometres and although there are 24 quarantine posts in charge of surveillance controls cannot be water-tight.
"It is necessary to make people living along the border more aware of the dangers to their own health involved in importing poultry," Thapa said.
"Previously, we focused on Tibet because of outbreaks in China and migratory birds, but now our attention has turned to India," he explained.
