This, even as the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), with the assistance of the police, has adopted the same measures in the two towns as it did in San Luis, Pampanga where avian flu was first confirmed over a week earlier.
The declaration would enable the provincial government to provide financial assistance to affected poultry owners, as well as to fund measures to prevent the spread of avian flu.
Earlier, bird flu in Pampanga also prompted Gov. Lilia Pineda to also declare a state of calamity in her province. Culling of hundreds of thousands of fowls in the affected Pampanga towns were reported to have been completed over the weekend.
The BAI here said culling of fowls have started in the one-kilometer radius “ground zeros” where the infected chickens were found in Jaen and San Isidro, even as it issued a ban on the movement of all fowls, eggs, and other related products outside a seven-kilometer radius “controlled zone.”
Regional epidemiologist Dr. Jessie Fantone of the Department of Health (DOH) here led yesterday his team for a meeting at the Paulino Garcia Hospital in Cabanatuan City with all health officers of cities and towns in Nueva Ecija to brief them on what to do in relation to the avian flu.
“It is a matter of importance that all health personnel of the entire Nueva Ecija be familiarized with procedures and policies in dealing with bird flu, even if there is no case of transmission of the virus from animals to humans,” he said.
Agriculture Sec. Manny Piñol said last week that tests confirmed that the H5 avian flu virus strain found in San Luis, Pampanga, was also found in the towns of Jaen and San Isidro, about 32 kilometers away.
Fantone said the BAI has yet to receive from an Australian laboratory the results of its study on samples from San Luis chickens to determine whether the affected fowls were also hit by an avian flu strain that could be contracted by humans.
He said that while it is believed that the avian flu that hit San Luis might have been brought by migratory birds in the nearby Candaba Swamp which hosts thousands of migratory birds from other countries annually, experts are intrigued by the origin of the virus that hit the Nueva Ecija towns which are far from Candaba.
Already, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) here is monitoring bird sanctuaries in Central Luzon as thousands of wild birds from other countries are expected to migrate anew to various sites in the region by next month.
