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Saturday, July 09, 2005
Pelayo urges gov't: Prevent bird flu entry to Candaba
By Joel P. Mapiles
CANDABA -- Mayor Jerry Pelayo urged the Department of Agriculture (DA) and Department of Health (DOH) to support the local government here in undertaking preventive measures against the entry of bird flu and keeping the town's vast swamps free for bird flu outbreak.
Pelayo's statement came amid reports that bird flu cases were traced in Barangay Pungo, Calumpit, Bulacan, a province adjacent to this town.
Pelayo said at least 18 barangays here, where some 350,000 ducks are raised at any given time, could be threatened by bird flu, which has broken up in the said barangay in Calumpit.
Pelayo said they have installed checkpoints in strategic places here to stop the transportation of poultry to and from the town as one of the precautionary measures.
Hence, Pelayo encouraged the DA and DOH to regularly visit the town and provide technical and financial assistance to protect the province's bird sanctuary.
"We have also created monitoring teams for ducks being taken here, even in small quantity by the residents who were trading in nearby towns," Pelayo said.
Pelayo said there is no reason to be alarmed as he claimed that migratory birds could not transmit bird flu as they normally come to the town during the last quarter of the year.
Pelayo noted that the multimillion-peso duck raising industry has been supplying the main source of poultry by-products like "balot" to Pateros and some market places in Metro Manila and nearby provinces.
In Calumpit, Mayor James de Jesus bared that his town has been placed under quarantine to prevent the further outbreak of bird flu to other barangays.
De Jesus has advised his constituents from temporarily consuming ducks for food until health authorities have declared them as free from bird flu.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III disclosed that the Philippines has detected its first case of bird flu after ducks were found to be infected in a town north of Manila.
Duque said samples had been sent to Australia to determine whether the strain of avian influenza was the same as the one that has killed dozens of people elsewhere in Asia.
"There's no cause for alarm," Duque said in a television interview. "We're still investigating the case."
A quarantine zone had been set up around the town of Calumpit in Bulacan province to halt the trading and sale of poultry for a week, he said.
The H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus has killed 54 people of 154 infected in Asia so far. More than 140 million chickens have been killed in the region to halt bird flu, causing millions of dollars of losses.
(July 9, 2005 issue)
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