WHO, DOH: RP still free from bird flu virus

The government has mapped out an "influenza preparedness and response plan" to combat bird flu should the deadly virus enter the country, the Department of Health (DOH) said yesterday.

"We primarily want to prevent the entry of bird flu here. The plan also involves the banning of poultry products from affected countries. We have long implemented this," Dr. Luningning Villa, DOH program manager for emerging infectious diseases, said in a hastily called press conference.

This plan involves various stages by which the government hopes to keep the disease at bay.

She added that they are also concerned about how chicken and other poultry products are handled from farm to market.

The Department of Agriculture (DA) has been conducting random inspections of poultry farms to determine if the bird flu virus has entered the country.

Last July, international experts found that a low-risk strain of avian influenza was found at a duck farm in Calumpit, Bulacan. The Australian Animal Health Laboratory found it was the H5N3 strain, and the Philippines remains free of the deadly H5N1 strain that has ravaged other Southeast Asian poultry industries.

The Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) said the ducks in Calumpit may have been infected by migratory birds.

Dr. Jean Marc Olive, representative of the World Health Organization to the Philippines, said that what worries the WHO is the possibility of human-to-human transmission of the bird flu virus now that some countries have experienced the spread of the disease from chickens to humans.

He said the "multimillion-dollar question" is when the virus, transmitted from chickens to humans, will mutate and enable itself to be transmitted from human to human.

WHO records show there are already 115 people who were infected with the H5N1 virus in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Olive warned that the world experiences a pandemic every 20 to 30 years.

"So we are due for one. Where will it start? We don’t know. Maybe it may not even start with the chicken virus... But we have to be prepared. That’s why the WHO is helping countries be prepared. We have to be on our toes," he said.

The Philippines, which had been the only country in Asia with a significant poultry industry not affected by bird flu, has taken a number of precautionary measures, including strict bans on poultry imports from affected countries, in an effort to keep it out.

The Philippines’ P150-billion poultry industry employs 300,000 people.

Officials have been closely watching 25 areas, mostly swamplands and watering holes of migratory birds that can carry the virus, while imposing an import ban on live or uncooked poultry from at least 11 affected countries.

Poultry producers had previously prepared the Avian Influenza Protection Program (AIPP) to beef up the country’s preparedness for the bird flu virus.

One of the proposals under this program is for the DA to establish "compartmentalized poultry zones" that would still allow areas affected by bird flu to continue trading in the export market should the H5N1 strain enter the country.

Philippine Association of Broiler Integrators (PABI) president Rita Imelda Palabyab said the zoning scheme would be similar to what the BAI did for the hog sector.

To enable producers from Mindanao and Visayas to export pork meat and pork products, the BAI declared these areas as free of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD).

Luzon expects to eliminate FMD by the end of this year, enabling producers from this part of the country to also export their pork meat and pork products.

Palabyab said these compartmentalized zones will be determined by natural geographic boundaries or a single entry-exit to other zones. Once established, all coordinating agencies should build a surveillance database to include a survey of all poultry holdings, species, population, disease profile, regular sampling and testing of poultry population.

At the same time, movement between zones of live poultry and its by-products will be regulated through issuance of health certificates and shipping permits.

The installation of these poultry zones is part of a four-stage preparedness and response plan under the AIPP. The first stage involves banning the import of all live poultry and poultry products from infected countries. The second stage outlines measures to be taken if the H5N1 strain enters the country.

Stage three outlines possible measures if the virus is transmitted from poultry to humans, while the last stage deals with the transmission of the virus from one human to another.