Phils: State to undertake first large-scale animal culling

Business World
http://www.bworldonline.com/BW022409/content.php?id=071&src=2

THE GOVERNMENT would cull some 6,000 hogs from a swine farm north of Metro Manila following a confirmed outbreak of Ebola Reston virus (ERV), making it the first disease-related large-scale destruction of domestic animals.

"A depopulation will be carried out in Bulacan province... to prevent the spread of Ebola within and outside the farm," Health Secretary Francisco T. Duque III said in a press briefing yesterday.

The hogs would be immediately culled after procedures to ensure animal, operator and biosecurity safety.

Mr. Duque said the culling would have a minimal impact on pork supply given an estimated 13 million head of pigs nationwide.

Animal and public health experts from the World Health Organization, World Organization for Animal Health, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the Agriculture and Health departments have collected animal and human blood and tissue samples from two hog farms in Bulacan and Manaoag, Pangasinan province last month.

Meanwhile, an additional human sample from Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija province was tested positive for ERV, bringing the people who have been infected to six.

"He [patient] does not recall any direct contact with sick pigs but remembers having flu-like illness in the past 12 months. There is no evidence that the flu-like symptoms can be attributed to ERV infection," the agencies said in a joint statement.

Mr. Duque said Ebola Reston "poses a low risk to human health at this time."

"This now confirms the earlier tests done by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine that Bulacan has an ongoing viral transmission," read a statement issued also yesterday.

The cost of culling would be shouldered by the government, said Davinio P. Catbagan, director of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI). Mr. Yap refused to disclose the actual amount.

The department has spent less than P10 million to keep the tested farms in operation, Mr. Yap said.

In a separate interview, Albert R. T. Lim, Jr., president of the National Federation of Hog Farmers, Inc., said fatteners and piglets cost an average of P3,000-P4,000 per head, boars cost P25,000-P30,000, and sows cost P14,000-P15,000.

That will be the first large-scale eradication of animals because of a disease, Samuel B. Animas, chief of BAI’s animal health division, said in a separate phone interview.

"Only one to three pigs are slaughtered at a time in backyard farms during the foot and mouth disease infection [in the 1990s]," he added.

Ebola Reston, which is only found in the Philippines, had been confined to monkeys. The latest detection among pigs is the first time the virus has jumped species.

Hog farmers from Bulacan, whose movement would not be limited, will engage in self-monitoring for 21 days from leaving the farm.

Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary Arthur C. Yap has lifted the quarantine in a hog farm in Manaoag since there were "no evidence of ongoing viral transmission."

Ebola Reston, a sub-type of the deadly Ebola in Africa, was first discovered in the Philippines in 1989 among crab-eating macaques being exported to the Hazleton Laboratories in Reston, Virginia, USA.

Late in October, the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture reported to the Philippine Agriculture department that six out of 28 pig tissue samples taken from four different hogs in Luzon island were tested positive of the Ebola strain.— Neil Jerome C. Morales