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Following is a transcript of remarks (English portion) made by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, at a media stand-up session in the Legislative Council Complex today (December 21):
Reporter: (On avian influenza.)
Secretary for Food and Health: First of all, the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department will be culling all the 17,000 chickens in the Cheung Sha Wan Temporary Wholesale Poultry Market. They should finish the work today, because we do not like to see any more chickens remaining in the market overnight. In addition, they have also inspected 29 out of 30 chicken farms in Hong Kong. They would also go through the last one today to ensure that there is nothing abnormal in the chickens in those farms. And so far, they have not found anything abnormal in these 29 farms. They have also taken blood and swab samples from the chickens to ensure that we have a thorough test for the virus and also the antibodies in those chickens.
At the same time, the Hospital Authority has also raised their alert to receive patients who might have symptoms of severe influenza and also history of contact with live chickens. So these are the measures we are taking. We will also be following up the virus details in terms of the genetic make-up and also the DNA sequencing of the virus of the affected chicken. The samples we have collected (from dead birds) in the beginning of this year belong to the 2.3.2 clan. So I think we will have to know whether the recent two dead bird samples together with this dead chicken sample are also the same type. And with that we will be able to ascertain whether the vaccines we are now using for our chickens are still effective.
Reporter: (On compensation.)
Secretary for Food and Health: We will compensate the trade $30 per chicken for those that needed to be culled.
Reporter: (On the origin of infection.)
Secretary for Food and Health: As far as the origin of the infection, we do not actually have very certain information yet, because the chicken was discovered in a bin that is for collecting dead chicken. It can come from the Mainland or local farms. So we will be investigating the virus genetic make-up to see whether we have some indications there. Regarding the actions that have been taken, I think we have been doing the things we need to do according to the contingency plan of avian flu. We are basically following all the same procedures we used to be doing. So there is no cause for alarm that we are not in control. We are really in control.
Reporter: (About the alert level.)
Secretary for Food and Health: We have put the alert level to "Serious". It means the condition is more serious than the baseline. So definitely I think with a chicken being infected, humans who are in contact with live chickens will have a higher risk of getting infected. But once we have got rid of the risk now at the wholesale market, and if all the farms being investigated are finally certified to be clean from any infection, I think the risk will remain the same as before.
Reporter: (On labelling chickens.)
Secretary for Food and Health: I think our consideration now is whether we should introduce some sort of label, like the rings around chicken feet, to let us know actually where chicken comes from, which farm and so on. But that would also incur additional cost. So we need to talk with the trade.
Reporter: Is $30 negotiable?
Secretary for Food and Health: No, it is according to the law.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Issued at HKT 20:39
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