Sorry, couldn't resist.
Posted on 03/04/2009 12:11:48 PM PST by Mother Abigail
Beautiful! Thanks!
Chilling word choice.
can’t they just napalm the whole farm.
Free range animals vulnerable to diseases: How can that be? /sarc
Swine depopulation likely to end today
Written by Ramon Efren R. Lazaro / Correspondent
Thursday, 05 March 2009 20:21
PANDI, Bulacan—The depopulation of more than 6,000 swines contaminated by the Ebola Reston virus in a piggery farm in this town is expected to be completed by today.
This was the assessment of Dr. Roldrien Morales of the Bureau of Animal Industry, who stands as the ground commander of the depopulation team.
He noted the depopulation rate has been increasing each day from 442 on Sunday to 795 on Monday, 1,426 on Tuesday and 2,078 on Wednesday.
Members of the depopulating team told the BusinessMirror the operation yesterday morning that started at 8 a.m. till 11 a.m. has culled more than 300 heads, which translates to more than 5,000 heads depopulated since the operation begun.
The culling operation would hopefully end by Friday and the disinfection of the farm could begin either by Saturday or Sunday, Morales said.
Morales said as of late Wednesday, the team has used 554 sacks of charcoal and consumed 160 liters of kerosene per day, including the truckloads of firewood and rice hull.
The burning process involves several layers of fuel and animals in the ground pit.
Rice hull makes up the first layer, followed by firewood mixed with coal, then rice hull again, and the culled animals and coal are on top of these covered with rice hull, coal and firewood and is torched. When the pile starts to burn, a final layer of rice hull is placed on top. Morales said the procedure came from fire experts.
The first ground pit, measuring eight meters by 50 meters by five meters deep, is already filled with culled pigs, and the second pit is already being used for burning the dead animals, Morales noted.
Dr. Joy Gomez, provincial public health officer of Bulacan, has declared that the six members of the depopulation team that experienced dizziness, headaches and fatigue were suffering not from viral infection but dehydration.
After a series of medical checkups, Gomez said the six workers were found to have been affected by their protective suits and the working conditions, as they have to work out in the sun and their bodies easily got dehydrated.
Meanwhile, Bulacan Gov. Joselito Mendoza said demand for pork in Bulacan province has declined by about 50 percent based on the price and demand monitoring he has ordered.
The decline in demand, however, was not because of the Ebola Rreston virus scare but of the financial situation of consumers, Mendoza said.
Mendoza noted the decline in the demand for pork started shortly after the Christmas holidays.
Farm-gate prices of pork are now between P100 and P105 per kilo compared with P115 and P120 before Christmas, according to the governor. The market price for pork is currently around P160 per kilo, from P180 before Christmas.
Good. Must have been terrifying in the meanwhile, though.
>can’t they just napalm the whole farm.
My thoughts exactly.
Extraordinarily disgusting as well.
-ccm
That's a lot of pork. Almost as much as you might find in congressional earmarks!
Health workers noticed that some sows continued giving birth to piglets ever since the culling started Sunday. Authorities estimate that by Friday, a total of 500 more pigs would have been born.
I'll bet that is exactly how the pelosi abortionists talk about babies in our country. I wonder when they'll start simply shooting kids as they exit the birth canal. Same thing as partial birth abortion, just quicker.
Farms in Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog to be tested for Ebola Reston
Animal and public health authorities will next test swine farms in Central and Southern Luzon for the non-lethal Ebola Reston after the culling of some 6,500 hogs in a swine farm north of Luzon was expected to end on Friday.
“We are in a hurry to complete the depopulation of hogs in Pandi, Bulacan so we can mobilize our resources to conduct a surveillance moving out to Region 3 (Central Luzon) and Southern Tagalog,” Davinio P. Catbagan, director of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), said in a television interview on Friday.
The depopulation rate increased to some 6,500 from the original target of 6,000 after some sows gave birth during quarantine.
The surveillance team would next focus on backyard farms in the areas. BAI estimates that backyard hog farmers account for more than two-thirds of domestic hog production.
In Region 3 alone, the government would need to test farms in 566 villages which would require around 36,000 blood and tissue kits from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Goergia, USA.
“We will provide technical assistance on how [the authorities] would proceed with the surveillance,” Kazuyuki Tsurumi, country representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, said in a separate phone interview.
Mr. Tsurumi said FAO would also provide a limited amount of test kits but he refused to give an estimate.
Meanwhile, the Health, Agriculture and Environment departments would study the nature and habitat of Ebola Reston for six months to one year, Soe Nyunt-U, country representative of the World Health Organization, said in a phone interview.
“We suspect that the natural carrier of the [virus] are the fruit bats? [but] we do not have any conclusive evidence yet,” Mr. Soe said. He added that a connection has yet to be established between fruit bats and the hogs.
Ebola Reston, a sub-type of the lethal Ebola, was first discovered in the Philippines in 1989 among crab-eating macaques being exported to the Hazleton Laboratories in Reston, Virginia.
Industry leaders have said that the first large-scale disease-related destruction of animals in the country have cost the government P16 to P17 million. — Neil Jerome C. Morales
The outbreak was in Reston Virginia quarrantine facility for monkeys, hence Ebola Reston....
It was only later that the virus was traced to monkey farms in the PHilippines.
The real question is how it got from Mindanao to Laguna to Bulacan.
But we live in the area, and so far no problem...lots of Dengue, lots of influenza, and lots of diarrhea but no strange hemorrhagic fever.
Hunt for Ebola virus expanded
Tests for Ilocos, Central and Southern Luzon
By Carmela Reyes, Tonette Orejas
Central Luzon Desk
First Posted 21:09:00 03/07/2009
Filed Under: Agriculture, Health, Diseases, Animals, Consumer Issues
PANDI, Bulacan — As the 6,210th pig was slaughtered at 8:15 p.m. Friday on a farm in the village of Sto. Niño here, agriculture and health officials began to focus on a larger task of hunting and stopping the spread of the Ebola-Reston virus to other parts of country.
Dr. Eric Tayag, chief of the Department of Health’s National Epidemiology Center, said the virus has been contained in a pig farm here after a 70-person team, working six straight days, completed the extermination of more than 6,000 pigs.
That unprecedented measure by government, done to prevent further the spread of the virus from monkeys to pigs and humans, is unfinished, he said.
Tayag said the DoH and the Bureau of Animal Industry will proceed to track down the virus in other areas.
“We will hunt the virus wherever it is. BAI will conduct random sampling in the rest of Bulacan, Region 3 (Central Luzon), Region 1 (Ilocos), and Region 4 (Southern Tagalog),” he said in a telephone interview on Saturday.
“We are going to answer the questions: Has it spread in Bulacan? Has it spread to other regions? How wide has it spread? Aalamin natin kung saan pa (We’ll try to know where else the virus is),” Tayag added.
Random sampling will start as soon as BAI receives 20,000 testing kits from the World Health Organization, he said.
Dr. Davinio Catbagan, BAI director, said they would take blood samples from pigs in 566 backyard farms in other parts of Bulacan, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, and Tarlac to check the presence of the virus.
Tayag belied reports that six workers in the Pandi farm got ill because of the virus before or during the culling that began on March 1.
He said the virus was contracted by two farm workers in Pandi and one each in Valenzuela City and Pangasinan. Two workers in slaughterhouses in Cabanatuan City and Pangasinan also caught the virus.
“They had positive antibodies so they managed to fight [the virus]. Ebola-Reston has yet to cause illness in humans. This is the reason why our government is aggressive and doing very, very early detection and preventive measures,” Tayag said.
To make sure that the virus has been eliminated in the farm, Catbagan said the four-hectare facility would be disinfected starting Saturday up to next week.
Blowtorches will be used to extinguish the virus that may have settled in the cracks of the pens, Tayag said.
“It will take a few weeks or months before the BAI and DoH will decide if the farm can open again,” he said.
Once the farm is allowed to operate again, Tayag said a new stock of healthy pigs would be put in place. The new stock, he said, would be monitored.
“We will disinfect the farm, put in a new stock of healthy pigs and observe them,” he said.
The farm owner, in a telephone interview on Friday, said he has yet to receive compensation promised by the government, through the BAI, for the culled pigs. The owner could not be reached on Saturday.
As for the farm in Pangasinan, it has been quarantined since November or almost the same time the virus was detected in the Pandi farm, Tayag said.
BAI has also taken blood samples from the hogs in the Pandi farm so the agency and the DoH can gather reagents for testing and eventually develop vaccines against the virus, he said.
The 70-person team — comprised of BAI personnel, volunteers, farm workers, and policemen — has started undergoing a second round of psycho-social debriefing.
When the disinfection is done by next week, members of the culling team are required to monitor their body temperatures daily for 21 days. They are allowed to return to their families and work places, Tayag said.
“I feel relieved after the last pig was out. Tigil bantay na kami (We’re done with the monitoring task). We’re out of the hot zone, done with working under the hot sun or feeling pressures from the shots (from stun and real guns),” he said.
“I also feel relieved that no untoward incident has happened. No worker was injured. We have also satisfied the mapanuring (critical) media. They cooperated. They toed the line by being patient. We congratulate the media,” he added.
Catbagan described the depopulation process as “from good to best.”
“This was the first time that we did this process on pigs and on a large population at that… There were initial problems, like malfunctioning equipment, but we managed to address it. The process ran smoothly until the end,” he said.
Tayag thanked animal welfare advocates who monitored the process.
“Konting mali sa paghawak ng baboy, kinakantyawan na kami (They would call our attention even to the slightest mishandling of the pigs). I hope they understand this is not a slaughterhouse. This is a hot zone where the preservation of the human species comes first,” he said.
“Meanwhile, let’s eat pork and enjoy it, too,” Tayag said.
so far no humans sick in this area, although one man at the slaughterhouse in the nearby city tested positive.
Here a lot of the pigs are “back yard” types...it will take awhile to check all of them...
but we have a lot of mycoplasm pneumonia type cough going around...
The death of a dozen pigs last week in barangay Vitali, 72 kilometers east of this city, was caused by mainly swine flu and not the Ebola Reston virus as earlier feared by people in the city.
This was the finding of a team of experts from the Department of Agriculture (DA), city veterinarian and city health offices that went to Vitali and conducted an on-site investigation.
Apart from swine flu, other possible causes of the death were Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, Classical Swine Fever, Actinobacillus Pleuropneumoniae, Salmonellosism Enzootic and Heat Stroke, said Dr. Mario Ariola, chief of the city veterinarian office.
DA regional director Oscar Parawan and veterinarian Dr. Marie France Jalao, of the DA regional office that was part of the team, corroborated Ariola’s pronouncement.
Parawan said swine flu is a common disease in hogs that requires proper medication to prevent complications from bacteria that lead to the death of the pigs. He said they also discovered that water in Vitali where the pigs died contains E. coli that can complicate infection when mixed with food eaten by hogs.
City health officer Dr. Rodel Agbulos also disclosed that the five-year-old child who died at same time as the pigs suffered severe dehydration caused by infectious diarrhea, and not from eating pork infected by the virus as earlier feared by people in the city.
The team also found out that the owner of the swine that died had sold the meat to the community and this caused diarrhea and other symptoms of one family and eventually led to the death of one child.
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