Dr. Jessie Fantone, regional epidemiologist of the Department of Health (DOH) here who personally encountered the two poultry workers with alleged avian flu symptoms, also debunked reports the workers were isolated and hospitalized for the fowl disease.
Fantone said he received last Tuesday from the Regional Institute of Tropical Medicine (RITM) results of its study on nasal and throat extractions from the two workers indicating they did not have avian f u.
“It isn’t true that the two were isolated or hospitalized,” he said.
This, even as Fantone said that no hospital in the country, except the RITM in Alabang, Muntinlupa City, has the capability to handle human avian influenza cases.
Fantone related that last Monday, he and his staff went to the quarantined poultry in Barangay San Carlos to gather blood samples from 20 farm workers as a matter of procedure amid confirmation that chickens in the poultry had died of avian flu.
“We noticed that one of the workers had cough and another had some fever so we got nasal and throat samples from them, without having them confined,” he said.
Fantone said the samples were brought to the RITM for avian fl u testing.
He said the results were forwarded to him last Tuesday and that the findings were negative.
“As of this moment, there is no report of suspected avian fl u in humans in our country,” he stressed, as he lamented “wrong information” on the two workers which, he said, apparently emanated from the office of DOH chief epidemiologist Dr. Eric Tayag.
Fantone also said there is yet no hospital in Central Luzon which is equipped to handle human avian influenza cases. “Even the regional Jose Lingad Hospital in San Fernando can’t handle such cases, although it is equipped with an isolation room,” he noted.
He said patients in the isolated room would eventually be moved to RITM which is the only hospital in the country which can handle human cases of avian flu.
This, even as he also clarified reports that samples from poultry in affected areas have already been sent to a laboratory in Australia for a more definite confirmation of the type of avian flu that hit San Luis.
“As of yesterday, the samples still had to be sent,” he said.
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) said in its website that while cases of avian flu infection in humans have been reported, such cases are rare.
It also said that while H1N1 avian flu strain is difficult to transmit between persons, mortality rate in infected humans is about 60 percent.
