Press Release
April 27, 2009

LOREN SEEKS MEASURES TO PREVENT ENTRY OF SWINE FLU

Senator Loren Legarda, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Food and Committee on Health and Demography, urged the government to organize an inter-agency task force that would draft and strictly implement measures to prevent the entry of the swine flu virus in the country which is now affecting Mexico and the United States.

Loren was reacting to the statement of World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan who said that the outbreak in Mexico and the US constituted a "public health emergency of international concern".

According to reports, a strain of the flu has killed as many as 81 people and sickened more than 1,000 across Mexico, while US authorities reported 20 laboratory confirmed human cases of swine influenza.

Swine flu is a highly contagious acute respiratory disease normally found in pigs. It spreads through tiny particles in the air or by direct contact. According to WHO, it tends to infect large numbers of a given pig population, killing between 1 and 4 percent of those affected. People usually become infected through contact with pigs, though some cases of limited human-to-human transmission have been reported.

Loren wants the Department of Agriculture (DA) to mobilize its regional and provincial offices to step up monitoring and surveillance of all hog farms to immediately detect any signs of the disease in the local hog industry, although there is no reported swine flu case in the country as of today.

The senator noted DA's immediate intervention to impose a temporary ban on pork meat coming from Mexico and the US. Since the disease has already affected people in these two countries, she likewise wants the Bureau of Quarantine to be on red alert to monitor arriving airline passengers with symptoms of the swine flu, to prevent the possible entry into the country of potential carriers of the virus.

Loren also urged the DA to put up modern equipment that could help identify and cure diseases attacking hogs and other livestock and fowl.

"The country is one the best producers of hogs in Asia, however, we lack modern equipment that's why we are being left behind," Loren, who also chairs the Congressional Oversight Committee on Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization, said.

"We have to establish fully-equipped state-of the-art animal disease diagnostic laboratories in major hog producing regions of the country to ensure the prompt and adequate diagnosis of current and emerging animal diseases," she said.

Loren noted that when the Ebola Reston virus strain hit the country late last year, laboratory samples have to be sent to the US National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Plum Island, New York, in order to be fully identified.

Meanwhile, Loren will push for the immediate passage of a comprehensive bill on food safety that would ensure the highest quality of agriculture and fishery products for both domestic and international market.

The senator also seeks to rationalize the functions of concerned agencies such as the Bureau of Agriculture and Fishery Product Standards (BAFPS) and other regulatory agencies of DA.

"In line with this, I urged the BAFPS to formulate and enforce standards of quality in processing, preservation, packaging, labeling, importation, exportation, distribution, and advertising of agricultural and fisheries products," Loren said.

The BAFPS was established as mandated under the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) and was tasked to set and implement standards for fresh, primary-and-secondary-processed agricultural and fishery products.

Loren, likewise, called on the Department of Health to disseminate information on precautionary measures to avoid human case of the strain and work closely with world health authorities for the monitoring of the swine flu, even though there are no reported cases of the strain in the country.

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