NEW DELHI - India declared a fresh outbreak of avian influenza among poultry, the first this year, but a senior official said on Wednesday authorities were yet to confirm if it was the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain.

"We have avian influenza," Upma Chawdhry, joint secretary of the federal Animal Husbandry Department, told Reuters.

The outbreak was located on a small farm on the outskirts of Imphal, capital of remote Manipur state in the country's northeast where 133 chickens out of 144 suddenly died this month, Chawdhry said.

"The state government has been informed and asked to start the control and containment operations," she said.

Local officials said veterinary workers would start culling chickens, ducks and other birds within a 5 km (3 miles) radius of the farm on Thursday.

"It is an isolated case. No reports have come from other parts of the state," said Dorendro Singh, director of Manipur's veterinary and animal husbandry department.

Manipur, a remote state that is racked by separatist violence, borders Myanmar, which has fought outbreaks of the H5N1 strain of bird flu among poultry this year.

"Abundant Precaution"

In Manipur, at least 20 people living on the farm were taking Tamiflu, the most popular drug for treating bird flu, as well as six veterinary workers as a "matter of abundant precaution", Chawdhry said earlier on Wednesday.

Health workers involved in containing the infection in the area will also be given Tamiflu, she said.

The government plans to hold a news conference on Wednesday evening. India, with an overstretched public health care system, has reported no bird flu cases among humans.

India has a multi-billion dollar poultry industry and has had nearly a dozen alerts this year before the new outbreak.

The country declared itself bird-flu free last August after two major outbreaks of H5N1 among chickens in western areas in 2006.

New Delhi was praised by international agencies for its handling of last year's outbreaks, especially its quick compensation to farmers.

Regional Headache?

Border guards have been ordered to stop people bringing in poultry illegally from Bangladesh, China and Myanmar, Chawdhry said.

China and Bangladesh -- which share borders with India's northeast -- have reported bird flu among chickens this year, with China also reporting human cases and deaths due to the H5N1 strain.

Some Indian officials have said that impoverished Bangladesh had struggled to contain its outbreaks, and feared that the bird flu virus would spread to neighbouring Indian states.

To India's west, Pakistan has also reported cases of H5N1 in commercial poultry this year.

India has about 490 million chickens of which around 40 percent is backyard poultry across thousands of villages.

Globally, the H5N1 virus has killed nearly 200 people out of more than 300 known cases, according to the World Health Organisation, while hundreds of millions of birds have died or been slaughtered.

Witnesses in Imphal said chickens were being still sold in markets, but some people said they would not eat chicken.

"Now we are really scared to eat chicken," Prem Adhikari, a local resident told Reuters by telephone.