Wake up call

Ifirst heard Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol announce the outbreak of bird flu in Central Luzon when he served as guest of honor and speaker during the Luzon Mango Stakeholders forum held at the Sison Auditorium, Maniboc, Lingayen, Pangasinan last August 11, 2017.

He was quite late in coming to the forum, after traveling first to Pampanga to consult with the local government officials, affected farmers, and other stakeholders of the poultry industry.

During the forum, Secretary Piñol told his listeners that the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) is enforcing the quarantine of San Luis, Pampanga to prevent the exit of live poultry, poultry meat, eggs and chicken dung from the bird flu affected areas.

He confirmed that six (6) farms in Barangays San Carlos and Santa Rita sustained the country's first outbreak of bird flu with some earnestness of action needed. The Avian influenza that hit the farms in San Luis is “type A subtype H5,” he said.

In the press conference that followed his talk, he said that this type of avian influenza can cause illness and deaths to both animals and humans.

Secretary Piñol also reported some 37,000 chickens died of bird flu. He had around 500,000 chickens within a kilometer radius from and around the area of infection culled and eliminated to contain the spread of the virus.

While Secretary Piñol traveled to Lingayen for the Mango Stakeholders Forum, 12 quarantine stations were set-up around San Luis town by the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), DA Regional Field Unit-3, and local government units (LGUs).

Secretary Piñol told the participants to the forum that he has already informed President Rodrigo Duterte of the bird flu outbreak and contacted the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health and Zoonotic Diseases. He did not take this lightly but acted like it can become a national crises that will affect the livelihood of farmers not only in Central Luzon, but the whole of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

Immediately following his announcement of this emergency situation, Secretary Piñol was lambasted by politicians in Pampanga and their media friends, about his “hasty and careless” action. They said that the disease was an ordinary chicken flu outbreak, in spite of the huge number of monitored dead chickens, quails and ducks in the area.

Later, the Avian Influenza Task Force reported that four laboratory test confirmed Avian influenza outbreak has indeed occurred in San Luis.

I carried the story of bird flu outbreak in Pampanga as close to the version I heard from Secretary Piñol, especially his claim on the bird flu strain, “type A subtype H5,” as the one that hit the farms in San Luis. I was publicly corrected for reporting “this erroneous information” and was ridiculed afterwards.

Meantime, I awaited any change of opinion from the Secretary, he being the chief quarantine officer of the country, on the zoonotic nature of the bird flu virus that was menacing the local poultry industry. I stood by him for better or worse, and whether he knows it or not.

It was really a relief learning from the Secretary himself that an Australian Laboratory accredited by world health bodies to conduct laboratory tests on zoonotic diseases confirmed that “type A subtype H5” was indeed the bird flu that caused the death of thousands of chicken, quail, and ducks in San Luis, Pampanga.

This development in the local poultry industry should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially the stakeholders to prepare for the next occurrence of a larger outbreak zoonotic diseases.

It is a wake-up call because it showed many gaps in the nation’s quarantine and biosafety measures and preparedness. If Secretary Piñol did not take the risk of confronting the problem as it is, not as his detractors wanted, we may be seeing our agriculture dip further into its lowest performance yet.

If not contained, the bird flu, “type A subtype H5,” would have continued to spread, as it did to parts of Nueva Ecija. But thanks to the quarantine and clearing measures immediately enforced, it will not continue to affect the health of the local poultry industry, alter vegetable crop production in Benguet and Mountain Province, and also affect allied industries like restaurants and dealers of live poultry, poultry meat, eggs, and chicken dung and others in the value chain.

Several measures from detection, diagnosis, laboratory analysis, quarantine enforcement, culling, and the myriad of details to immediately effect biosafety measures were actually undertaken. They also highlighted how operations can yet go wrong and doom not only operations but the health and safety of overworked personnel.

With Secretary Piñol at the helm, we need to keep on revisiting what went well and what went wrong as we try to put in place a reliable system of timely and relevant operation for biosafety in our food production and agricultural livelihood industries. -30-