Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and now Indonesia are struggling to contain another outbreak of bird flu as millions of chicken are being culled and over a hundred dead in Indonesia alone. The bird flu fears have prompted ban on feeding swans in Japan and Malaysia as governments brace up to face any possible outbreak of bird flu.

The deadly H5N1 strain, which kills people as well as poultry, has broken out across a broad sweep of Asia, from Bangladesh, India to Indonesia. While neither Bangladesh nor India has so far had any human cases of bird flu, as many as 101 Indonesians have already died from the killer flu. Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, has been the hardest hit area, with 25 deaths from 29 new reported cases.

Since the disease re-emerged in Asia, the governments, backed by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have said fighting bird flu has become a sensitive and difficult issue as livelihoods of millions of people depend on the poultry trade. In many places in Bangladesh and in the Indian state of West Bengal, farmers were reluctant to give up their chickens for culling to the health workers.

Millions of birds have already died or culled. The virus that began plaguing Asian poultry stocks in late 2003 remains hard for people to catch, but scientists worry it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic. Most cases have been linked to contact with infected birds, but scientists believe limited human-to-human transmission has occurred a few times among blood relatives who had close contact.

In Bangladesh, the disease has been detected in 26 out of the country’s 64 districts, prompting authorities to slaughter at least 355,000 birds. Officials said the situation has worsened in the past week but the disease remains contained in the country. The situation in Bangladesh is so bad that the FAO has said the country needs house-to-house surveillance to fight bird flu because the situation is "posing a danger to public health". The statement from the FAO came as neighbouring India battled its worst outbreak of bird flu—believed to have spread from Bangladesh, which has been reporting sporadic outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain since February 2007.

In India, the virus has spread in three districts of West Bengal state and so far, health workers have killed nearly 2.5 million birds and were clearing areas within 3 miles of infection sites to contain the disease. The states of Jharkhand, Bihar and Assam, which share a border with West Bangal have been instructed to ban and prevent any entry of poultry-related products from Bengal. West Bengal animal resources minister Anisur Rahaman, who has already expressed fears the disease would spread to humans, said poultry farming would be prohibited in the affected areas for the next three months.

"With poultry farming prohibited in the affected areas for the next three months, villagers will suffer huge losses as they are dependent on poultry farming. We have discussed the matter and suggestions have been made to help self-help groups in the areas," said Anisur Rahaman.

When asked about the compensation price, the minister said: "We cannot provide 100 per cent compensation to villagers. We are giving them some relief for their damage and the payment would be made soon through the local panchayats (village governments)."

Fingers are being pointed at neighbouring Bangladesh for having been the source of the virus, disregarding the fact that neither the contiguous district in Bangladesh nor in neighbouring states of India has reported an outbreak nearly as serious as the one in West Bengal. Anyone looking at a map of West Bengal must find it amazing that the virus has travelled from Birbhum, where it was first reported, not in a straight line, as birds and viruses might be expected to travel. This would suggest that the virus has moved along established trade routes within the state, in other words , along routes under the control and supervision of the West Bengal government.

That the virus, once detected in West Bengal, was not tackled with the urgency that an emergency warrants has to do with two factors. One, the multi-layered administrative machinery of the West Bengal state where district and block-level committees of the ruling party assume a role in governance. Second, the paralysis inflicted upon government by a series of administrative misadventures in recent times.

The Army has been called in twice to deal with situations that ought to have been within the province and competence of the local civil administration, first to quell a mob of stone-throwing rioters in central Kolkata and next to help fight a fire. The Indian army must wonder if it will soon be asked to help cull chicken. These are signs of an administration that is uncertain how to contain the deadly disease.