The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization or FAO warned on Aug. 28 that the African Swine Fever which already claimed over 25,000 hogs in China can rapidly spread to countries in Southeast Asia or the Korean Peninsula where there is voracious demand for pigs.
FAO is particularly alarmed because the deadly virus is rapidly spreading in China and was in fact detected within weeks was already detected more than one thousand kilometers from the first place where an outbreak was reported. If not aptly prevented, the virus could cross the borders in just a matter of time, FAO said.
The Business Times previously reported that China has reported its fourth case of outbreak just last week in the province of Zhejiang. After four days, the virus has already reached Jiangsu which was about 1,200 kilometers from the northeastern Liaoning province where the virus was reported on Aug. 3.
To immediately address the outbreak and prevent it from proceeding further in the nearby regions, local Chinese authorities were quick to cull as much as 25,000 pigs in four provinces. Still, stopping the virus from spreading will be difficult since China's livestock industry range from small to large commercial swine herders. Beijing accounts for an estimated 500 million worldwide demands for pigs.
FAO is communicating with Chinese authorities to strictly monitor the situation, the organization said in its official announcement. Fortunately, FAO and the country's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in the previous years have already designed a contingency plan and developed the diagnostic capacity that is specifically targeted on addressing the deadly African Swine Fever. Wantanee Kalpravidh, FAO's regional coordinator, said China and the organization have in the past created a Field Epidemiology Training Programme for Veterinarians.
Kalpravidh, however, warned that if governments will end up restricting transport and selling of pork products, merchants could resort to illegal trade which could only make the matters worse as these products may pass inspections from health departments.
Kundhavi Kadiresan, FAO's regional representative for Asia and the Pacific, said the best way is for the governments to engage in a multilateral and inter-governmental coordination to stop the outbreak. The dialogue should also include the private sectors and the small hog growers, Kadiresan underlined.
There is no vaccine currently available to protect the healthy pigs from the African Swine Fever. The Swine Health Information Center in the United States said the virus resilient. The virus can thrive in the pens for the next 30 days even if ill pigs were removed from the animal enclosure. It can continue to live indefinitely in frozen infected pig carcasses. The African Swine Fever can still survive in pork products, even in dried hams for four months.
Juan Lubroth, FAO's chief veterinarian, believed that the latter is the main cause why the virus is spreading quickly in China. He said the trade of meat products rather than live pigs across borders might also cause the spread of the disease across the borders.
