Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol said on Friday bird flu cases were confirmed in Jaen and San Isidro towns in Nueva Ecija.

"The confirmation was made after series of laboratory tests on specimens gathered from quails and layer chickens were conducted by the Animal Diseases Detection Laboratory," Pinol said in his Facebook post.

There were over 100,000 heads of poultry in the farms in Nueva Ecija which were affected by avian influenza, he said.

Like in San Luis, Pampanga where the first bird flu outbreak was reported last week, a 1-kilometer contained radius and 7-kilometer controlled radius zones were established in the two Nueva Ecija towns affected by bird flu.

"Culling operations are ongoing for the other fowls in the 1-kilometer radius," Pinol said.

He said there were 401,894 layer chickens in Nueva Ecija, 28,000 of them were affected. Out of 502,005 ducks, 22,000 were affected; and out of 1.5 million native chickens, 57,000 were affected.

The 3.8 million broiler chickens and 200,000 quails were not affected.

The Department of Agriculture, including the military, has been slaughtering some 600,000 fowls in Pampanga. Celerina Monte/DMS