KOLKATA, India, Jan 14 (Reuters) - India began culling thousands of chickens on Monday and checking people for fever in a remote eastern village after preliminary tests on dead poultry showed they were infected with bird flu.

But officials were still testing to see if the latest outbreak of avian influenza was of the H5N1 strain.

Health workers wearing protective suits and masks began scanning backyard poultry around Margram village in West Bengal state where more than 10,000 chickens died in the past 10 days.

West Bengal borders Bangladesh, which is badly affected by bird flu with almost a third of the country's 64 districts affected by the virus.

"Not just the villages, we are also looking to cull chickens in a nearby town as most people there have backyard poultry," Mrinal Majumder, a West Bengal police officer, said.

"We have cleared roads, restricted movement of people and stopped people from selling chickens (in the area)."

Officials said they were receiving reports of dead birds from more villages. They estimate the number of birds that need to be culled at "several thousands".

India, home to tens of millions of farmers who keep poultry in their yards, has seen three major outbreaks of bird flu in poultry since 2006, all of which were brought under control. No human cases have been reported in India.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people.

Bird flu has killed more than 210 people in 12 countries since 2003, the World Health Organisation says. (Reporting by Bappa Majumdar; editing by Krittivas Mukherjee)

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