Bengalbirdflu

New Delhi: The Centre on Tuesday allayed fears of bird flu spreading to human beings in West Bengal, saying random testing of people in the affected areas has been carried out and all such samples have tested negative.

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"It is a general thing that if anybody has any fever or anything like that the blood will be tested and till date we have not got any confirmation for that (bird flu)," Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told reporters on the sidelines of a function in New Delhi.

The minister said that the screening is conducted between 0-10 km of the affected area and all people who live in the villages are randomly tested by health ministry teams.

"Till date we have not had any confirmation of that and there is no reason to be concerned of any cases of human cases of bird flu," he said adding "we are all vigilant".

The National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) which as a part of the Union Health Ministry is responsible for carrying out the screening today said that all five human samples taken from West Bengal have tested negative.

"In fact the samples which were taken from South Dinajpur and Birbhum did not have any clinical symptoms of the disease and did not even fit the definition of suspect cases," NICD Director Shivlal told PTI.

"Three samples which had been sent to NICD, New Delhi, had tested negative on Monday and NICD, Kolkata, which tested five samples has confirmed on Tuesday that all of them are negative for the presence of Avian Influenza," he said.

The samples had been randomly selected from people who had handled poultry, the villagers in the affected areas and the culling teams.

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