ENG-2018 — Page 214

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Food Safety, Environmental Hygiene, Agriculture and Fisheries

premises between 8pm and 5am. Live poultry retailers must ensure people working at retail outlets wear protective clothing and must report any dead poultry immediately to the FEHD. They must not overstock live poultry on their premises and must affix acrylic panels to their poultry cages to prevent direct contact between customers and the poultry.

To monitor Al effectively, samples are collected regularly for testing from poultry farms and wholesale and retail markets; from healthy, sick and dead birds; from birds kept in recreation parks and pet shops; and from wild birds in wetlands and elsewhere. The government provides a round-the-clock service for the collection of sick and dead wild birds and poultry. In 2018, the AFCD collected 10,777 wild bird and poultry carcasses and found two of them carrying the H5 Al virus.

Other preventive measures against Al include taking samples of faecal droppings and drinking water as well as swabs from defeathering machines and chopping boards at live poultry retail outlets to test for the Al virus; conducting regular inspections of live poultry retail outlets to ensure compliance with the special licensing or tenancy conditions on Al control; cleaning common areas of FEHD markets thoroughly three times daily; cleaning live poultry market stalls after business hours daily, followed by further thorough cleansing and disinfection by FEHD contractors; maintaining the cleanliness of market stalls' ventilation systems; conducting regular inspections, washing and disinfection of public places where wild birds gather, and taking stringent enforcement action against the feeding of wild birds in public places.

The measures are effective in preventing human infection of Al, as evidenced by the total absence of any locally infected human case of H5 or H7 Al virus after the first Al outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997.

Antimicrobial Resistance

The Hong Kong Strategy and Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (2017-22), launched in July 2017, tackles the increasing threat of antimicrobial resistance to public health. The action plan details measures to be implemented by the AFCD in the local food animal production sector, including livestock and fish, so as to alleviate the development of antimicrobial resistance and safeguard animal and public health.

In 2018, the department put in place preliminary measures to monitor antimicrobial usage and antimicrobial resistance, such as regular inspections of local food animal farms to collect data and samples including animal feed and health care products to evaluate antimicrobial usage, as well as biological samples for bacterial culture and antimicrobial sensitivity testing, in order to understand the situation and develop a long-term surveillance programme.

The department supports the development of veterinary services to local food animal farms and enhances stakeholders' awareness of the problem of antimicrobial resistance through campaigns. During the year, it held educational seminars for local food animal farmers to promote responsible and prudent use of antimicrobials, and to convey the message of preventing disease through good farm management practices and effective biosecurity

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