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Following is a transcript of the remarks made by the Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong, at a stand-up media session after officiating at the opening ceremony of the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Prevention of Elderly Suicide today (March 24):
Reporter: Dr Yeoh, can you give us a clear timetable for the import of live chickens?
Dr Yeoh: As I said last week, because the epidemic is stablising in the Mainland and based on the OIE's (World Organisation for Animal Health) recommendations, normally for a country to be declared free, you wait six months. But there are proposals now within the OIE that for zones within a country where there are specific procedures, that time frame can be reduced to three months. So we are looking at this proposal for importing live chickens within the three months of the last outbreak which will be May 12. That is on the conditions that we have agreed the surveillance programmes and how to strengthen surveillance programmes with the Mainland authorities. We have already started the pre-meeting with them and we are arranging to have a formal meeting with them within the week or so. And there we will be looking at two things, one is of course how good surveillance programmes and preventive programmes are because we know that the Mainland has done a lot of work to strengthen their programmes. So we need to be satisfied that those programmes assure that there would not be bird flu in those farms. The second is after having looked at the surveillance programmes, we also need to inspect individual farms before we permit imports. So we envisage the time frame will be around May 12 or so. If the discussions proceed smoothly and if the conditions are good, we might consider importing small numbers on a pilot basis before May 12 -- our current date for imports.
We also said that there are two other preconditions for importing live chickens from the Mainland because we also need to ensure in the wholesale market there are better conditions. The Director of Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation is planning to have two wholesale markets, one for local birds and the other for Mainland birds, so this prevents also cross-infection.
The third is in our retail outlets. As you know, in the past in our retail outlets, the chickens tended to be very overcrowded. So we intend to limit the number of birds that will be in the markets. So this will decrease the risk of bird flu. We will have short term and interim measures before the longer term measures of the human and chicken separation. The retailers will be asked to at least put some protective barriers, plastic barriers to protect public health. In the interim, we hope to reduce the number of retail outlets by half so that there will be more space which will then be used to reorganise the retail outlets, so that even in our market stalls, our intention is in future to have at least double the amount of space so that we have a separation and clean place where the chickens are kept, the chickens are slaughtered and the chickens are sold. And in the places where the chickens are kept, people will not be in direct contact with chickens. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department has already done an initial plan where these areas will be enclosed so that the people buying chickens will not be coming into direct contact. So through the glass windows you can look at chickens and choose the chickens and then they will be slaughtered, and then you collect them in the third counter. So these are the interim things that will take time to change.
In the longer term, as I have said, it is very important that we will
consult the public the next Friday to look at the options of how best
to separate humans from poultry to minimise the risk of avian flu to people.
So this will be a composite policy that we will be looking at the separation
at the farm level, at the transportation level, at the wholesale level
and at the retail level. In our options we will still be providing opportunities
for the public to taste fresh chickens. So there will be options of frozen,
obviously chilled and fresh chickens in the future, and the option of
separation will be contained in the document.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)
Ends/Wednesday, March 24, 2004
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