A health worker examines a bird in Navapur during the flu outbreak in February

New Delhi. July 16: Scientists have created the country’s first home-grown vaccine to protect poultry from the deadly bird flu by using the H5N1 avian influenza virus that had slipped into India earlier this year.

A research team at the High Security Animal Disease Laboratory in Bhopal, where the H5N1 virus was extracted from poultry tissues during the February outbreak in Navapur in Maharashtra, developed the vaccine after a four-month effort.

However, it is unclear when such a vaccine might be used on poultry because the government has taken a decision not to vaccinate chicken yet. Animal husbandry scientists are not in favour of mass vaccination of poultry because the outbreaks in Maharashtra were restricted to a small part of the state. Vaccinations would lead to chicken displaying antibodies to H5N1 virus.

“We have just developed the vaccine technology. There needs to be a scientific debate whether to vaccinate poultry in India,” Hare Krishna Pradhan, director of the laboratory, told The Telegraph.

During the outbreaks, the government had stocked three million doses of an imported vaccine, but decided it would not be used. The widespread presence of H5N1 antibodies in Indian poultry would take longer for India to claim it had eradicated H5N1.

“If we don’t have to use a vaccine at all, it’s a happy state of affairs,” said P.M.A. Hakeem, secretary in the department of animal husbandry.

The vaccine technology will need to be transferred to industry for production because the Bhopal research laboratory does not have the infrastructure to produce high quantities of any vaccine.

Scientists in the Bhopal laboratory used standard technology to make their prototype and tested it on laboratory chickens. “We killed the H5N1 virus with chemicals and worked out the dose at which it will work as a vaccine,” Pradhan said.

To test the indigenous vaccine, researchers divided a set of chickens into two groups ? birds in one group were vaccinated, the others remained unvaccinated. Chicken in both groups were infected with live and deadly H5N1 virus.

“After about three weeks, the mortality was 100 per cent in the unvaccinated birds. But among the vaccinated birds, 90 per cent survived. This is adequate protection,” he said.

In independent genomic studies, the Bhopal laboratory has also shown that the H5N1 virus in Maharashtra had originated in China, but had taken a circuitous route through Europe and West Asia before slipping into India.

While H5N1 has spread across three continents ? Asia, Europe and Africa ? scientists believe there is still scope to block its spread among birds even in countries where poultry and other birds have already been infected.