By Michael Oberteye:
Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture in charge of livestock has sounded the strongest warning yet to ‘scare-mongers’ in the cause of the outbreak of the bird flu that the law was firmly at the back of their heels. Miss Louisa Hanna Bisiw who was addressing a number of journalists on Tuesday at the National Disaster Management Organization headquarters in Accra noted that some unscrupulous individuals, for their own selfish reasons, were making peddling falsehoods and making false claims about the outbreak of the bird.
She explained that such people deliberately peddled the falsehoods about the local poultry with the interest of killing interest in the local poultry and drive their patronage towards the exotic poultry. These false peddlers according to her were mostly those involved in the import of foreign poultry and warned that such culprits would soon be rounded up and prosecuted for causing fear and panic.
Miss Bisiw was of the conviction that Ghanaian poultry remained the safest in the world and urged the consuming public to disregard the false alarms of exaggerated figures and consume their poultry without fear.
She equally noted the activities of some farmers which is moving infected birds from one farm to the other with the aim of spreading the disease, adding that such culprits would also be severely dealt with if caught.
The deputy minister further urged poultry farmers to seek ‘movement permits’ before moving their birds from one location to the other which is another step to curb the spread of the disease. Again she was stern about the fact that farmers who refuse to obtain these permits before moving their birds would have their birds destroyed unconditionally.
Source: ritefmonline.org
