Common Chicken Diseases in the Philippines

Twenty-three of the twenty-seven Philippine avian influenza outbreak dates recorded so far in 2026 were backyard flocks. Two were commercial, one was mixed, one was unclassified.

That is 85.2%, and it is a reversal. The record this country has notified to WOAH runs from 24 July 2017 to 24 June 2026, eight years and eleven months, and holds 251 outbreak dates. Across all of it the split runs 135 commercial to 99 backyard, with 7 mixed and 10 carrying no classification at all. So backyard is 42.3% of the dates that carry a classification, and 39.4% of every date in the record. Whichever denominator you use, the wave running now is landing on bakuran, at doon nakatira ang halos lahat ng bumabasa nito.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean, because this is the part of the site where being wrong is expensive. It does not mean backyard flocks are newly vulnerable. It may mean the commercial sector got better at keeping it out, or that reporting patterns changed. Ang alam natin ay kung ano ang naitala, at iyon lang.

What the record holds

Every Philippine avian influenza outbreak notified to the World Organisation for Animal Health is public, and this site holds all of it: 251 dates, each one built from the official WAHIS report for that outbreak.

Central Luzon is the only region named on 145 of those dates. A further 23 list it alongside a second or third region, which puts it in 168 of the 251 either way. Under both readings it carries more of the record than every other region put together. Kung nasa Region III ang bakuran mo, ibang usapan ang biosecurity para sa iyo kaysa sa ibang lugar, and no national average will show you that.

On 235 of the 251 dates the recorded action was culling or stamping out. There is no row anywhere in that record where a confirmed HPAI flock was treated and recovered. Everything worth doing therefore happens before a bird is sick, at doon napupunta ang buong puhunan mo: sa kulungan, sa kung sino ang pumapasok doon, at sa kung ano ang dala nila.

The archive states its own limits, and I am repeating them because they change how the numbers should be read. WAHIS is the country’s own notification, so it counts flocks that were reported, tested and confirmed. It is a floor, never a ceiling. And “backyard” is the reporting country’s own classification. Several units filed as backyard here hold thousands of birds, so the label is not a synonym for twenty manok sa bakuran.

The label problem has a counterweight worth putting numbers against. PSA counts the national chicken flock four times a year and splits it by holding size, and on 1 July 2026 there were 89,298,658 birds in smallhold holdings out of a national 228,489,122, where that inventory table draws smallhold at 500 birds or fewer. 39.1%, against 37.97% on 1 January. Hindi sulok ng industriya ang bakuran. It is nearly two chickens in five, at doon dumadapo ang mga petsa ng 2026.

Where it is now

BAI publishes a weekly status count, and this archive carries it from 29 May 2026. At 7 August 2026:

One hundred and sixty-eight against six. Those two columns get quoted interchangeably and they mean completely different things, though not in the way most people assume. Both describe this week. The first counts barangays still under an avian influenza restriction, which is what BAI’s own panel calls remaining affected areas; a barangay leaves it when it is declared free again. The second counts barangays with a live case. So roughly 162 barangays are carrying the restrictions without a current case of their own.

That is why the two are kept in separate groups rather than on one page. A headline built on 168 describes a national emergency; a headline built on 6 describes a contained tail of one. Both numbers are true and only one of them answers “maglalagay ba ako ng batch ngayong buwan”.

Whatever you do with this section, do not carry the figure in your head. It moves weekly, and a status quoted from memory is out of date before you finish repeating it. Sa susunod na linggo, iba na ang bilang. Open the affected-areas group and read the latest row.

One bad year, and eight quieter ones

The record is not a steady drip. It is one enormous year with a long tail behind it.

2018, 2019 and 2021 carry no rows at all. 2022 alone carries more than every other year in the record put together, and the years since have fallen every year until 2026, which is already above the whole of 2025 with half the year left to run.

Read that shape carefully before drawing anything from it. A falling count can mean fewer outbreaks or it can mean fewer notifications, and the record cannot tell the two apart. What it does establish is that this is episodic rather than constant: there are years where a Philippine keeper faces almost nothing recorded, and there was one year where the sector faced 132 confirmed dates. Hindi ito bagay na pare-pareho kada taon, kaya ang plano na “ganito naman noong isang taon” ay mahina. Ang isang taon dito ay hindi hula sa susunod. The year is also the weaker cut of the two, because which month of the year those dates fall in turns out to be far less even than the years are.

One row in that record is not a poultry flock at all. A single date is a wild-bird detection, an Arctic warbler and a Common Redshank, and it is labelled as such rather than folded into the poultry count.

Why the early signs will not tell you which disease it is

Every other page ranking for this query gives you a checklist: these signs mean Newcastle, these mean coccidiosis, these mean fowl pox. The signs do not divide up that cleanly, and the reason is worth a paragraph.

Kung sabihin ko sa iyo kung ano ang sakit ng manok mo, hindi ko naman talaga alam. Hindi po ako beterinaryo, and a confident checklist from somebody who is not is worse than no checklist, because it gets acted on.

The harder reason is in the state’s own paperwork. BAI does publish a clinical signs list for avian influenza, in the manual quoted through the rest of this page, and the same manual defines a confirmed case as a positive H5 or H7 result on qRT-PCR. The list is not the definition. Sudden death sits at the end of that list, and it sits on the Merck Veterinary Manual’s Newcastle page too, where it is recorded as sometimes the only finding there is. Ang mali dito ay hindi maliit: it costs a flock, and in the notifiable cases it costs your neighbours’ flocks too.

No prevention checklist follows either, because the one Philippine document that comes closest to telling a keeper what to have in place stops short itself. The DA-BAFS Code of Good Animal Husbandry Practices for Chickens says at § 5.4.2 that “[t]here should be a written chicken health program in place, including a vaccination and deworming program, if required, that is updated regularly and supervised by a licensed veterinarian, in accordance with the requirements of the competent authorities”. Note the verb. That is a should-level clause in a voluntary code, not a requirement, it carries no schedule and no dose, and it hands the writing of the program to a licensed vet.

The nearest thing to a schedule anybody has published in this country sits in a different standard, and it is marked as an example rather than a rule. Annex F of PNS/BAFS 370:2023 lists six entries at four ages: Marek’s (HVT) and a Newcastle plus Infectious Bronchitis vaccine on the day of hatch, ND plus IB again at 14 to 21 days, fowl pox and a third ND plus IB at 8 to 10 weeks, and an ND plus IB booster after six months. The annex is labelled (Informative), it attributes itself to an undated “(Cruz, n.d.)”, and the note under it confines vaccination to a licensed veterinarian’s supervision.

Read the shaded entries before the rest. Only two of the six name broilers at all. Every other one names layers and breeders, and a broiler is slaughtered long before the 8 to 10 week line. The one vaccination circular the DA has issued does not fill that in either: DA Memorandum Circular No. 49, series of 2023 is the guidance on targeted vaccination against avian influenza, its § V.A.1 says vaccination shall not be mandatory, and its Table 1 marks smallhold broiler chicken as not eligible. It sets no ages for anything, including the HPAI vaccines it does cover. Wala pong nakasulat na dose sa alinman sa dalawang dokumento, at wala rin dito.

What can be said concretely comes from the same references. Merck records mosquitoes and other biting insects as mechanical vectors for fowl pox, which widens what counts as traffic between flocks: not everything that carries a disease into the bakuran arrives on a vehicle or on the sole of a boot. How the coop is built belongs to the same question, at bago pa dumating ang problema nagagawa ang desisyong iyon.

Six routes cross that boundary: new birds, people and the footwear they arrive in, borrowed equipment moving between bakuran, feed and water, vehicles at the gate, and biting insects. Two of the six rest on a document rather than on my own reading of the risk, and the insects are one of them, four lines above. The other is the vehicle route, and that one is the state’s own. BAI’s manual of procedures asks at § 3.2.3a for “vehicle wheel baths or designated vehicle disinfection area” and at § 3.2.2c for the plate number of anything that comes through the gate. Nothing in it ranks the six against each other, so nothing here does either. Isang pares ng boots na naiwan sa loob ng kulungan ang pinakamurang bagay sa listahang iyon, at walang kinalaman ang mura sa kung alin ang pinakadelikado. What the manual does rank is something else, ten province-level risk factors rather than these six routes, and which of the standard biosecurity measures a bakuran can actually run takes that weighting apart against the four that FAO marks as not applicable at this scale.

What the laboratory rules out

When a suspected case tests negative for avian influenza, BAI does not stop there. Its 2025 manual sends the same samples for “differential laboratory diagnosis (using ELISA or qRT-PCR) for Newcastle Disease (ND), Infectious Bronchitis (IB), Infectious Laryngotracheitis (ILT) and Fowl Cholera, among others”. That clause is the closest thing to a published Philippine differential a backyard keeper can read, and it is a list of tests rather than a list of signs.

Every entry in the right-hand column is a laboratory.

Merck puts Gumboro’s most susceptible window at 3 to 6 weeks and its mortality anywhere from 5% to more than 60% depending on the strain, which is a spread too wide to read anything off. And Mycoplasma gallisepticum, the organism behind what most keepers mean by CRD, runs with high morbidity and low mortality in uncomplicated cases, alongside what Merck calls a marked polymicrobial interaction with respiratory viruses and Escherichia coli. More than one thing can be running in the kulungan at once, and two together do not read like either of them alone.

Merck’s Newcastle page also records morbidity and mortality reaching 100% in the acute form, and says that form has to be differentiated from highly pathogenic avian influenza.

One caution attaches to that whole table. Four of those seven rows rest on Merck, an international reference standing largely on controlled commercial housing, and I have not read a Philippine clinical reference for those four at the document. A bakuran runs hotter, denser and with less control than the conditions those figures came from.

The line BAI draws is lower than you think

The Avian Influenza Protection Program Manual of Procedures was approved and adopted through DA Memorandum Circular No. 11, Series of 2025, signed by Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel Jr. on 11 April 2025. Its foreword says the 2025 edition “updates the previous 2005, 2016, and 2020 editions”, incorporating lessons learned from the 2022 HPAI incursion. That is the year the table further up this page turns on.

Inside it is a definition of a suspect case, and it is not the same definition for your bakuran as for a commercial farm.

The operative word in the smallhold row is any. No count, no percentage, no waiting for a second day. Almost every page you will read on this subject describes the trigger as birds dying suddenly and in numbers. The state draws it lower than that, and lower for you than for the farm down the road.

The rest of the row is stranger, and more useful. It is not about your flock at all. Unexplained poultry deaths anywhere in your barangay or purok, inside a window of two to five days, put you in the same position as deaths in your own kulungan, whether or not anybody thought to tell you.

Which row applies to you depends on how the state sizes you, and the manual’s glossary quotes PSA Board Resolution No. 04 s. 2022 for that. Smallhold, “previously referred to as ‘backyard farm’”, is 500 heads or fewer for broilers and 250 or fewer for native, free-range or improved chicken, layers and ducks. Semi-commercial starts at 501 broilers, or 251 native, layer or duck birds.

Set that against the inventory figure earlier on this page and the definitions come apart in your hands. The OpenSTAT inventory table draws smallhold at 500 birds or fewer for chicken with no split by type at all; the Board Resolution splits it, 500 for broilers and 250 for native. Kung 300 native ang alaga mo, smallhold ka sa isang talahanayan at semi-commercial ka na sa isa pa. Neither one is wrong. One was written to count a national flock and the other to size a farm for a response, and nobody publishing either has a reason to reconcile them.

Twenty-four hours to tell somebody

Once you have a death you cannot explain, the manual starts a clock. For farms without a veterinarian and for smallhold raisers, the owner or farm manager “shall report within 24 hours to the nearest barangay official and/or Local Government Unit (LGU) Veterinarian or Agricultural Officer about the occurrence of unexplained mortality”, and may “opt to report directly to BAI or DARFO concerned”.

The barangay official is the part worth stopping on. You do not need to find a veterinarian before you report. The nearest name on that list is usually somebody a backyard keeper can reach on foot within the day, which is the only way a 24-hour rule works for a household with no vehicle and no vet within reach.

There is no hotline to print here. I went looking for a national reporting number across BAI’s own published pages and found none that resolves, so the routes named in the manual are the routes there are.

That call is not an admission of anything. The Philippine outbreak record is built from reports, and a flock that gets reported is how the 168-barangay figure exists at all. It is also not optional in the notifiable cases. Avian influenza is notifiable to WOAH by the country, which means it has to reach the country first, and it reaches the country through you.

The parts of the response that reach a backyard keeper soonest are not the parts about the culling. One line in the manual is worth more to a smallhold than it looks: for backyard farms the LGU provides the disinfectant, while on commercial farms the owner provides it. Malaking bagay iyon sa may 20 manok lang sa bakuran, kasi doon napupunta ang unang gastos pagkatapos ng culling.

How long the coop stays empty

Longer than most people plan for, and how long depends on a choice the manual leaves to you.

Restocking with sentinel poultry is optional. § G Section 3 opens on exactly that: “Restocking with sentinel poultry is optional. In case the farm owner proceeds with restocking, it will be shouldered by the farm owner.” Two clauses further on, the same section says that for smallhold farmers, DA “shall provide sentinel poultry/birds, feeds and vaccines”, with the age and type set by the technical working group. Both are true and they are about different things. The birds, the feeds and the vaccines come from DA on a smallhold; running the restocking operation is the owner’s cost.

Take the sentinel route and the manual sets out this sequence. A rest period of 21 days after the final disinfection. Then at least 30 sentinel head per household on a smallhold operation, against 300 per farm on a commercial one. They are grown out for a minimum of 35 days, given the basic vaccination program for IBD, IB and ND, observed daily, and swabbed on days 7, 21 and 35, thirty oropharyngeal or cloacal samples per round, or a minimum of ten birds on a smallhold farm. That is 56 days between the final disinfection and the end of the sentinel period. It is a floor and not a schedule, because § 3.7 then puts the premises through another cleaning and disinfection before repopulation.

Decline the sentinels and it runs longer, not shorter. The same section says that where restocking with sentinel birds was not conducted, “the previously infected farm will be allowed to restock and resume operation three (3) months from the last day of final disinfection, provided that there have been no reported cases within the 1 KM quarantine area”. Three months against roughly two, so the cheaper-looking route is the slower one. Alinman sa dalawa, matagal ang bakuran na walang manok.

Either way the premises has to be reclassified before it goes back to full capacity. The BAI Director approves that when no HPAI is detected in the sentinel population, or when no additional cases turn up inside the 1 KM quarantine area within three months. Tatlong buwan na walang kita ang bakuran, at hindi iyon lumalabas sa kahit anong outbreak count.

Register now, or get 20%

This is the part of the page you can act on today, with nothing yet wrong in your flock.

If your birds are culled in an avian influenza response, what comes back to you is decided by whether you were registered before any of it began. A facility carrying animal welfare registration, Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture (RSBSA) registration, or local registration from the LGU receives “cash assistance of 100% of the total amount of the culled animals”. A clause later: “All non-registered smallhold/semi-commercial/commercial farms shall only get 20% cash assistance.”

Eighty points of the value of a flock, decided by a piece of paper. Hindi iyan maaayos sa araw na dumating ang problema. Ngayon pa lang ang panahon niyan, habang wala pang nangyayari sa mga manok mo.

The same document fences it in.

• It pays for the culled animals only. The manual names what is excluded: destruction of contaminated feedstuffs, disinfection of equipment, direct culling costs, restocking costs, economic losses from a drop in market conditions, and improvement of biosecurity measures.
• It does not cover susceptible animals moved onto the affected farm after the disease investigation and sample collection.
• Assistance is withheld where a previously affected farm “restocked without prior clearance from the BAI and DA-RFO and subsequently had another HPAI outbreak”. Both halves of that condition have to be true, which is narrower than it usually gets reported.
• A DARFO or BAI representative may refuse payment in whole or in part where the owner does not satisfy the eligibility conditions.

The rate per head is not in the body of the manual. It is set by DA Administrative Order, “uniform throughout the country”, and the manual carries the prevailing issuance as Annex 19.a. That annex is DA Administrative Order No. 37, series of 2020, reproduced in full, and it is a scan rather than live text, which is why searching the file for it finds nothing. Article 3, Section 7 holds the table:

That is the table as published, at Annex 19.a of the 2025 manual, read there on 15 August 2026. Read it with its conditions attached. Rates “shall be adjusted from time to time through a DA Administrative Order”, so this is the prevailing issuance and not a permanent number, and the age floors in the left column are conditions rather than description: a broiler under two weeks and a layer under ten weeks are not in the table at all.

Now the arithmetic is yours to do, which is the whole point of a published rate. Fifty broilers at the ₱60.00 rate is ₱3,000 if you were registered before the outbreak, and ₱600 if you were not. Twenty layers past ten weeks sit at the ₱100.00 line instead. Malayo iyon sa halaga ng manok sa palengke, and it is not trying to be that: it is cash assistance against culled birds, not a purchase price. Ang agwat sa pagitan ng dalawa ay gastos mo pa rin, at wala iyon sa kahit anong dokumento.

There is a clock on the money as well. The AO’s own timeline “should not exceed 14 days” from the day the farmer reports to the day the payment documents are checked and validated, with culling commencing on day 7 and completed within seven days of that. Payment may come as cash, cheque, post office, voucher or bank transfer. The LGU is separately directed to allocate funds for additional indemnification or insurance premiums on top of whatever PCIC or DA pays.

So both halves are knowable before anything happens: the rate per head, and the share you qualify for. Ang papel na iyon ang pinakamurang bagay na magagawa mo ngayon para sa bakuran mo, at lumalabas lang ang halaga nito sa araw na kailangan mo na. Ask the LGU which registration your flock can hold, and hold it before there is a reason to.

What nobody knows

Here is the hole in all of it.

Nobody has published what an avian influenza wave actually costs a Philippine backyard flock. The WAHIS record counts birds in flocks that were reported, tested and confirmed. Birds that died in a bakuran where nobody called anybody are in no dataset in the world. That is gap G-6 in the gaps register, and it is the only entry there marked permanent rather than open. The missing data is missing because the event went unreported, and an unreported event does not become reported later.

So the 3,188,039 birds in the record are the counted ones. Ilan pa ang hindi nabilang? Walang nakakaalam. Not BAI, not WOAH, not me.

That matters for a decision you might actually be making. If you are trying to work out the risk of placing a batch this month, the published record gives you the reported outbreaks and their locations, and nothing at all about the unreported ones. Use the dated area counts for where the confirmed cases are, use what the table at the top of this page says about Central Luzon, and treat both as the floor.

And if it does reach you, report it. Hindi lang iyan para sa kapitbahay mo, at hindi rin para sa BAI. It is the only way the number that describes your situation ever gets measured at all.

Questions people actually ask

Is bird flu active in the Philippines right now?

Check the dated figure rather than any sentence in an article. At 7 August 2026, BAI recorded 168 barangays still under an avian influenza restriction and 6 with an on-going case, across 14 restricted provinces of which 2 had an active case. A barangay leaves the restricted list when it is declared free again, so that first figure can fall as well as rise, and it is redrawn every week.

Does avian influenza mostly hit commercial farms? Show the answer

Historically the record splits 135 commercial against 99 backyard, with 7 mixed and 10 dates carrying no classification at all, across the 251 outbreak dates WOAH holds for the Philippines from 2017. So backyard is 42.3% of the dates that carry a classification, and 39.4% of every date in the record. Say which denominator you mean, because the two get quoted interchangeably. In 2026 the pattern reversed sharply: of 27 dates recorded so far, 23 were backyard flocks.

What happens if my flock is confirmed positive? Show the answer

The response recorded on 235 of the 251 Philippine outbreak dates in the WOAH record was culling or stamping out. There is no treatment path in that record. The Bureau of Animal Industry's 2025 Avian Influenza Protection Program manual requires a smallhold raiser to report unexplained mortality within 24 hours to the nearest barangay official, the LGU veterinarian or the agricultural officer, with the option of reporting straight to BAI or the DA regional field office. Afterwards the premises rests 21 days from the final disinfection before anything goes back in. Sentinel birds are optional under the manual: a keeper who uses them grows them out at least 35 days under swab testing, and a keeper who declines them waits three months from the last day of final disinfection instead.

Do I get paid if my chickens are culled for bird flu in the Philippines? Show the answer

In part, and how much turns on whether the flock was registered before the outbreak. The Bureau of Animal Industry's 2025 Avian Influenza Protection Program manual gives a farm holding animal welfare registration, RSBSA registration or local LGU registration cash assistance of 100% of the total amount of the culled animals, and gives non-registered smallhold, semi-commercial and commercial farms 20%. The peso rate per head is set by DA Administrative Order and the manual reproduces the prevailing one, DA Administrative Order No. 37 series of 2020, in full as Annex 19.a: ₱100.00 per head for layers, ducks and breeders aged 10 weeks and above, ₱60.00 for broilers aged 2 weeks and above, ₱150.00 for gamefowl, ₱15.00 for quail and pigeons. It covers the culled birds only, not feed, disinfection, restocking or lost sales. The rate is revised by Administrative Order from time to time, so check the prevailing issuance rather than this sentence.

Can I tell what disease my chicken has from a website? Show the answer

No, and a page claiming otherwise is the problem rather than the solution. Several serious poultry diseases share their early signs, several are notifiable, and getting it wrong costs a flock. What is recorded and reportable can be looked up; the diagnosis itself needs a veterinarian who can see the bird.