Tarlac acts vs spread of FMD

CONCEPCION, Tarlac — Provincial authorities made "sacrificial lambs" of at least 600 hogs in this town, slaughtering them last week to prevent the spread of the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD).

Fears of an FMD epidemic seem grounded, with Dr. Lorna Baculanta, provincial veterinarian, admitting that more than 4,000 other hogs elsewhere in Tarlac have been monitored to be infected.

Baculanta said this was Tarlac’s worst FMD outbreak since the livestock disease took its toll on piggery farms across the country in 1995. The province had been declared FMD-free for the past two years.

This town’s mayor, Benjamin Lacson, said the provincial veterinary office allowed piggery farms here to resume their normal operations following the slaughter of the 600 hogs.

Baculanta said the FMD here was traced to the municipal slaughterhouse where some of the butchered pigs could have come from viajeros or merchants who transported and sold hogs from one province to another.

"There were FMD-positive animals being killed in that slaughterhouse," she said.

Still another possible source of the FMD infection, Baculanta added, was a piggery farm which has not conducted any FMD vaccination for more than two decades now. She, however, refused to identify the piggery farm.

To avert a province-wide FMD outbreak, Gov. Jose Yap Sr. has ordered that animal quarantine checkpoints be set up along all roads leading to the province.

Yap also instructed Baculanta’s office to vaccinate all FMD-prone farm animals, and local officials to disinfect public slaughterhouses.