LA TRINIDAD, Benguet – The municipal government is aggressively working on the mandatory registration of backyard and commercial hog raisers in the town’s 16 barangays following the re-emergence of the African Swine Fever (ASF) in four barangays.
Mayor Romeo K. Salda said the barangay officials were tasked to implement the mandatory registration of commercial and backyard hog raisers in their areas of jurisdiction to ensure the documentation of the high raisers in the municipality.
Under the ongoing mandatory registration of hog raisers, individuals and companies are being compelled to declare their hog raising activity and the number of hogs that they are taking care of for monitoring purposes.
Last week, Salda reported that ASF had been discovered in some hogs being raised by individuals in barangays Lubas, Bahong, Puguis and Wangal that prompted the concerned authorities to raise the alarm button on the re-emergence of the virus that prey on hogs.
The local chief executive disclosed that immediate dis-infection of the hog raising areas were done in the concerned barangays although the infected pigs were already culled that placed the situation under control.
However, he claimed that the culling of hogs within the 1-kilometer radius was not implemented because the areas where the infected hogs were discovered were distant from the populated areas of the aforesaid barangays but stringent monitoring activities are being done in the area to ensure that no other hogs in the barangays will be infected in the future.
Earlier, hundreds of hogs in barangay Beckel were culled out of a commercial piggery farm and a backyard farm after it was discovered that some of the pigs had been infected with ASF that placed the municipality under the red zone and stringent safety measures must be imposed in the disposal of pigs and pork from the said places.
According to him, hog raisers voluntarily culled out the infected pigs from their backyard farms to prevent the spread of the animal virus that might significantly affect the hog raising activities of other individuals and companies in the different barangays where no ASF infection had been found by veterinarians.
Mayor Salda asserted that the ASF infection in the municipality is under control because of the timely reporting of the ASF infection and the immediate interventions that were put in place by concerned experts that prevented the further spread of the animal virus to other barangays in the municipality that have could have caused more problems for involved government agencies and the local government.
He called on inventoried hog raisers to immediately report to the concerned government agencies and the local government any incident of ASF infection of their hogs so that appropriate measures could be put in place to control the rapid spread of the animal virus and spare other hog raisers from being affected with the infection in the future.
The municipal mayor pointed out that monitoring will be done by representatives of government agencies and local government offices on the hog raisers that registered to ensure that no additional hogs will be affected by the virus that continuous spread of the same in the locality.
By Hent
