New Delhi, Jan. 14: Fears of avian influenza have erupted at a time when two key officials in the team that had stamped out India’s previous outbreaks have moved on.

Hare Krishna Pradhan, the former director of the High Security Animal Diseases Laboratory in Bhopal who had built from scratch India’s only diagnostic centre for avian influenza and trained scientists there, is now retired.

Upma Chowdhry, the Union animal husbandry joint secretary, has been assigned different responsibilities in the same department.

They had been the key players in the effort to contain the deadly H5N1 virus in Maharashtra in February 2006 and again in Manipur last year.

Sources said the quality of co-ordination and action by the duo, who worked as a team with animal husbandry commissioner Shantanu Bandopadhyay, had helped the authorities to rapidly extinguish those outbreaks.

Pradhan had the responsibility of testing samples of dead birds for the deadly H5N1 strain.

Once an outbreak is detected, the animal husbandry department sets in motion an established protocol to cull all poultry birds within a fixed radius from the core.

Bandopadhyay continues in his position and was tonight awaiting results of tests on poultry samples from Birbhum.

But virologist Brahmadev Pattnaik, a senior scientist in Bhopal earlier, is now project director, Foot and Mouth Disease, which affects cattle, goats and sheep. Pattnaik had developed a diagnostic test for avian influenza.

A senior official with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research said the movement of personnel would not affect the nation’s capacity to handle future outbreaks.

Animal husbandry officials said Chowdhry’s “experience will be tapped in the event of any outbreak”.