Did Gujarat hush up bird flu for Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit?

AHMEDABAD: It took the state two days to get the report from the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases (NIHSAD) lab in Bhopal confirming the H5N1 virus in birds that died at the campus of an NGO in Hathijan on December 31. Culling operations began on January 3, the day the report was received. Back then, there were just nine days left for the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit.
It took the same state machinery 10 days to get a bird flu confirmation from NIHSAD for another set of birds, at the Memnagar campus of an NGO, Sarva Dharma Raksha Trust.The blood and dropping samples of the Memnagar birds were drawn on January 3 and sent to Bhopal. Interestingly, the state government received the confirmation only on Wednesday, when the Vibrant Gujarat summit was under way. Culling of the birds began late on Thursday night, after the VGGS valedictory function had ended.
How did a matter of serious public health consequences, which also has the city’s crime branch probing, go off the state government’s radar for more than a week? There are thousands of Amdavadis living in the residential area within the 1-km quarantine zone from the Memnagar epicentre, and there is a school just a stones throw away from it.
Another issue that has come to light is that three of the Memnagar NGO operators — Jaimin Shah, Anil Chaudhry and Sameer Patel — were being administered Tamiflu tablets by the health department since January 7. Was the state aware of the bird flu confirmation on January 7?
A volunteer from the Memnagar trust questioned the Bhopal test report, stating that not a single bird had died between January 3 and January 12 midnight, when the culling began. While in the case of the Hathijan NGO, infected birds died within four days of being brought from Mumbai.
State health minister, Shankar Chaudhary, told TOI “Even during VGGS, I constantly enquired into the bird flu situation. We have been making all possible efforts and never ignored the bird flu scare.
A senior agriculture department official admitted that the culling of birds on the night of January 11, would mean that officials would have had to check the quality of meat at hotels in a 10-km radius when the VGGS foreign delegates and expats were around.