The country’s top World Health Organisation (WHO) official, Mohamed Belhocine, told AFP that the laboratory will help speed up the process of identifying human cases.
Mr Belhocine said health authorities were touring farms across the north of the country, where tens of thousands of birds have been slaughtered, looking for any human infections.
"All the people who have been in contact with infected chickens have been listed and we are monitoring them for 15 days although the incubation period of the virus is a week," he said.
A spokeswoman for the UN Children's Fund urged the Nigerian government to put in place an appropriate compensation program to encourage farmers to report sick poultry to be culled and prevent panic selling.
"Compensation is key to the process, people must know how much they will be paid and the first of the payments must be widely publicised," said Christine Jaulmes from the UNICEF agency.
But already Nigeria's Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo has conceded that the government’s plan to compensate farmers with 250 naira (less than two dollars) per chicken is inadequate and is at least half the market price.
H5N1 detected in EU
Meanwhile in France, the ministry of agriculture announced that a second wild duck found dead in the village of Bouvent in the Ain region was infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.
The country is bracing itself for further cases with as many as 15 other wild birds being tested for the highly pathogenic virus.
"There is a strong chance that we will find very shortly in France, as in Germany, many more cases of wild birds infected by the H5N1 virus," the health ministry said.
Health officials in Austria have also confirmed the presence of H5N1 in two chickens found dead in an animal pound, marking the first time the virus has appeared in poultry in the European Union.
A spokeswoman for the health ministry, Danielle Retzek, said the poultry infections were "an isolated case" as the birds were contained in a refuge and not in a chicken farm.
Herbert Oster, the owner of Noah's Ark animal pound where the dead chickens were found, told AFP the birds were apparently infected by a swan that was brought there earlier this month.
Mr Oster said the swan was handed in after it was found lost in a canal in Mellach, located near the area where Austria's first cases of infected swans were detected earlier this month. He said that the swan appeared to be healthy when it arrived.