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The southern European country of Portugal has offered to help the Philippines get rid of the dreaded African Swine Fever (ASF), the Office of House Speaker Martin Romualdez bared on Wednesday, June 14. The offer was relayed to Romualdez by Portuguese non-resident Ambassador to the Philippines, Maria Joào Falcào Poppe Lopes Cardoso, when she paid him a courtesy call at the Manila Golf and Country Club in Makati City. “These propositions are of great mutual interest to both countries,” said Romualdez, who committed to endorse the matter to the concerned agencies of the executive department for appropriate action. Romualdez is also looking at possible initiatives to expand bilateral trade and cooperation with Portugal in areas of technology and defense. According to the envoy, who is the concurrent Portuguese Ambassador to Indonesia and Brunei, a company in her country is “willing to make a donation of expertise and to travel to the Philippines to support eradicate swine fever". Cardoso noted that Portugal has extensive expertise on the matter, being one of the only two countries in Europe that successfully eradicated ASF. Reports earlier said that as of June 1, there are 15 provinces in the Philippines that have active ASF cases, although there were fewer detections in the past few weeks. Ramon Garcia, Jr., Portugal’s honorary consul in Manila, said an organization of pork producers in Portugal is willing to send two experts in the Philippines to train personnel of the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) in eradicating ASF. ASF is a highly contagious viral disease of domestic and wild pigs, the mortality rate of which can reach 100 percent. So devastating is ASF to livestock that the government resorts to mass culling of hogs in a given area even if just a few hogs had been affected.