Another certainty is that for a nation with a poor record of public healthcare, containing the virus will be a steep challenge. India's Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has quarantined the area in the district of Nandurbar and dispatched medical teams to cull up to half a million chickens from around 16 farms. Other flocks on nearby farms are being vaccinated. Ramadoss has also sent a million doses of H5N1 bird vaccine to Nandurbar. But despite his assurances that "people need no panic, the situation is under control," Indian newspapers on Monday published pictures showing some farmers participating in the cull wearing no protective clothing, and reported that others refused to allow their animals to be killed until they were compensated.
By dispatching a million vaccines, Ramadoss has also already used up half the government's stock. The sense of lack of preparedness mounted with esoteric advice from Indian Council of Medical Research, which advised people to stick to Indian food as it is "always well-cooked." The Times of India even reprinted a recipe for chicken curry on its front page. Meanwhile a poultry industry body, the National Egg Coordination Committee, was denying there was any outbreak at all, claiming the birds died of Ranikhet disease.
Some suspect bird flu has been in India for a while, but merely gone undetected. Indeed Maharashtra's Animal Husbandry Minister himself suggested the outbreak began in mid-January. "As they died, truck drivers just dumped them on the highways," says Anees Ahmed. "The damage would have been less if we had been informed on time, but we were not kept in the picture." Nor does India's record on dampening the spread of other diseases inspire confidence. While some southern states, which are generally richer and have better healthcare, have won commendation from health experts for their efforts to contain HIV and AIDS, for example, others in the poorer north are accused of covering it up. Last year India surpassed South Africa as the country with the world's highest HIV/AIDS population, with 5.127 million people infected. And yet by April last year, two of India's most populous states, Bihar (population 88 million) and Uttar Pradesh (population 166 million), were claiming respectively to have just 155 and 1,383 cases of HIV or AIDS. Experts say the figures simply aren't epidemiologically possible. The World Bank calls India's AIDS statistics "unreliable," and Richard Feachem, executive director of the Globan Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, adds the true total is more like 8.5 million.