Price, quality of poultry products watched

Malacañang said on Sunday it was monitoring the quality and price of poultry products following a Department of Agriculture (DA) report of an outbreak of avian flu.

“We believe the DA has acted fast on the issue and has managed to isolate and contain the virus,” presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella said.

“Concerned government agencies are now looking at businesses that might take advantage of the situation and are monitoring the price of raw and processed chicken meat in the markets,” he said.

“While we assure the public that there will be no price increase in chicken meat as there is only one area affected by the avian flu, we must see to it that uncontaminated meat is sold in the markets,” he added.

Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol on Friday said around 200,000 fowl in San Luis, Pampanga province, had been affected by the outbreak.

He said the chickens were not necessarily infected, only culled because they were within the 1-kilometer quarantine radius.

The virus was believed to have originated in San Luis’ layer farms in April but was only discovered in August after government experts conducted tests, he said.

The DA chief added that these farms only produced eggs, not meat, lowering the possibility nearby towns would be infected.

“It would have been a different story had they been producing broilers or chicken for the meat market,” Piñol said.

He said 12 quarantine teams were closely monitoring attempts to sell contaminated meat in the market.