Dr. Arlene Vytiaco, head of BAI’s animal health and disease control section, also said in a telephone interview that her bureau has not reversed its earlier circular allowing chickens, fowls and related products to be transported to Visayas and Mindanao.
“The administrative circular stands,” she said amid media reports yesterday that BAI had withdrawn its decision. She stressed, however, that fowls from the seven-kilometer radius controlled zones in San Luis in Pampanga and in Jaen and San Isidro, Nueva Ecija are not covered by the lifting of the restriction.
At the same time, Vytiaco said that as of press time, no other report of avian fl u cases has been reported in any part of the country. “We have been strictly monitoring and we have not received any report of unusual deaths of chickens and other fowls anywhere else,” she said.
This, even as Carmencita Nogoy, chief of the agri-business and marketing division of the regional office of the Department of Agriculture (DA) here, said that as of yesterday, lack of buyers has brought down further the price of fresh chicken to only P90 per kilo from an average of P130 per kilo before the avian flu outbreak in San Luis, Pampanga over a week ago.
“People in Central Luzon remain in fear of buying chicken, except in Bataan and Zambales where the price of chicken has been reported at the normal P130 per kilo,” she said. The P90 per kilo is the lowest so far, down from P95 per kilo last week.
Meanwhile, Vytiaco said that an Australian laboratory had confirmed Type A sub- Type H5 avian flu strain in San Luis, its confirmatory study on whether the samples from San Luis could also be of the N1 strain that could be contracted by humans is not expected until three days.
“It turned out that the Australian laboratory lacked specimens so it had to culture the specimens to be able to conclude its study by Friday (Aug. 23),” she noted.
