For 'irresponsible' statement on bird flu: Vexed Tommy O wants ATO official transferred

Mayor Tomas Osmeña plans to request President Gloria Arroyo to transfer Air Transportation Office assistant secretary Nilo Jatico from Cebu for issuing "grossly irresponsible" statements about bird flu.

Jatico's alleged reference to bird flu as "dungoy," the Visayan term for a disease that infects chickens, as "nothing new" in the country got Osmeña's ire.

"I'm informing the president through a letter about his grossly irresponsible statements. I can't imagine we have a serious threat and then here comes an irresponsible statement from a self-proclaimed expert," Osmeña said in a news conference yesterday noon.

He said he is seeking Jatico's transfer and that he be severely sanctioned.

The mayor said "dungoy" or Newcastle Disease is not the same as bird flu because "dungoy" is not the killer H5N1 strain that has already killed millions of chicken, geese, and ducks since the outbreak in 2003.

Newcastle Disease, on the other hand, is a highly contagious, generalized virus disease of domestic poultry and wild birds characterized by gastrointestinal, respiratory, and nervous signs.

"If you are being interviewed, people come up to you as a person in authority. If you do not know what you are talking about, better keep quiet," the mayor said.

Jatico, in an interview recently, dismissed any implication between "dungoy" and H5N1, seeing no need to restrict flights to bird flu-affected countries like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia where there have been reports and strong insinuations of bird-flu related deaths on humans.

He said the aviation industry is "market driven" of which travel restrictions owing to virulent disease outbreaks would have no impact.

He said this is an issue that Customs and Immigration authorities should address and not aviation.

While there is no evidence yet that the H5N1 virus can spread between humans, scientists warned that the fast growing prevalence of the disease among birds heightened the risk that it could mutate and infect local populations.

Air passengers are identified as the first vector of infection prompting the World Health Organization to urge heightened surveillance and vigilance and for government to boost a network of bio-surveillance among its populace to detect and contain disease outbreaks.