The spread of deadly bird flu in Bangladesh has forced health authorities to slaughter about 150,000 birds at a poultry farm in capital Dhakaas Sunday, government officials said on Monday.

Government officials said they were taking measures to contain the disease’s spread, but ignorance among millions of farmers in the impoverished country is a barrier in their trial, Reuters reported.

The decision to cull the largest ever number of chickens Friday night comes after detection of the bird flu virus in the Omega Poultry Farm Limited that had 165,000 chickens. The sudden death of some chickens alarmed the farm’s staff. Therefore, they sent some samples of the dead chickens Wednesday to Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute for test where the presence of deadly H5N1 virus was detected on Thursday.

"Omega is one of the top farms which rigorously maintained international bio-safety regulations but it was not spared by the deadly flu. The situation is so bad nobody is buying any poultry these days. They're panicking. The crows and migrant birds are spreading the flu everywhere, leaving authorities simply hopeless," M.M Khan, a senior official of the Bangladesh Poultry Association told the Agence France-Presse.

More than 850,000 chickens on 270 farms in 43 districts have been culled following detection of the H5N1 virus in March last year, an official from the Bangladesh Livestock Research Institute said, according to Reuters.

Bangladesh’s poultry industry is one of the world’s largest, producing 220 million chickens and 37 million ducks annually. The industry has reportedly lost $714 million due to the virus.

No cases of human infection have been reported in Bangladesh. Experts fear that any widespread outbreak could be disastrous for the country because its dense population and poorly equipped public health care system.

According to the World Health Organization, 227 people have died worldwide from bird flu. Health experts fear that the virus, which is usually spread through human-bird contact, could mutate into a form easily passed from human to human and millions of people could die because they would have no immunity to the new strain. So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds.