Fair means and fowl

My tweets: + It is safe to eat chicken. I just had chicken joy from that food chain yesterday. Government officials led by Department of Agriculture Secretary Manny Pinol sampled even before TV and clicking cameras balut, fried itik and chicken.

+ My friend businessman Mike Tapang is rolling his sleeves to see the realization of a toll road that will connect Porac to Bacolor that will use the mega dike alignment. It will be the principal road to be used by sand and gravel trucks coming from Porac town.

WITH eggs and chicken, most Filipino households meet their protein needs. That’s why the Department of Agriculture (DA) is right in taking an aggressive approach to the outbreak of avian influenza in Pampanga, although farm owners and market vendors have complained about how their incomes have dropped.

So far, some 37,000 infected chickens in six poultry farms in San Luis, Pampanga have died this year. The DA has estimated that up to half a million chickens would have to be slaughtered there to keep the infection from spreading.

Central Luzon accounts for at least one third of the country’s supply of both broilers and layers, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. Since 2015, Central Luzon has dressed more chickens than either the Visayas or Mindanao. The fact that the outbreak occurred in one of the country’s top three regional sources of chicken meat and eggs adds to the pressure on government authorities to contain it fast.

Here’s how local governments and communities can help: first, by keeping a closer watch on the entry of chicken from the outside, although all farmers in Pampanga are prohibited, for now, from transporting fowl outside the province. Second, local officials can send inspectors to check on the health of birds in local poultry farms and the safety standards kept in places where livestock is processed. As if the challenge wasn’t complex enough, the avian flu virus can be spread by waterfowl and ducks, which can carry the virus without showing any sign of illness.

While this is the first case of avian flu in the country, our authorities can draw on the lessons learned in the past 20 years that this public health threat has existed in other countries. Our neighbor Indonesia, for instance, is one of two countries where the World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded the most avian influenza A(H5N1) cases among humans (199 cases, 167 deaths) from 2003 to July 25, 2017. (The other country is Egypt, with 359 cases and 120 deaths in the same period.)

This will be the Philippines’first year on the WHO list for this infection, which has reached 16 countries so far (859 cases, 453 deaths since 2003). For agriculture and health officials, a balancing act will be key: enough caution to keep the outbreak from spreading, but not too much that it frightens consumers from buying otherwise safe chicken supplies. “There is no evidence,” the WHO assured in November 2016, “that avian influenza viruses can infect humans through properly cooked food.”

— Sunnex