A new case of African swine fever has been confirmed on Monday to occur in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the second in the region, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said.
The highly contagious livestock disease continues to spread across China, one of the world's top producers of pig and pig products, as a new outbreak occurred on a farm in Inner Mongolia, a Reuters report said.
As stated by the news outlet, there were at least eight hogs confirmed to have died due to the African swine fever while 14 were seen to have been infected in a farm rearing a population of close to 160 animals.
Authorities have already green-lighted an emergency response strategy to safely remove the dead hogs and at the same time disinfect the affected ones.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, through its latest press release on the matter, said that this outbreak is the 16th to have happened in China since the early weeks of August.
As pointed out by the state-run news agency, Xinhua Net, the said outbreak in Inner Mongolia is now declared under control.
Prior to this event, a separate report from the same news outlet previously cited two outbreaks, one coming from the same region and the other from China's Henan Province.
At least 60 pigs from the city of Xinxiang, Henan, were confirmed to have been infected and died of the disease.
Despite the efforts of Beijing, together with the local provincial government, to quarantine the outbreak, the fever continued to catch on other pig farms.
Because of this, China opted to issue a total ban on the transport of live hogs and other pig products especially those coming from affected regions, and even from those areas which exhibited similar cases.
In line with this, the ministry has also banned the use of feeds processed from big blood and food waste in at least 16 provinces around the country.
Growing Concerns
There are now growing concerns among Chinese consumers about the swine flu outbreak affecting the pork supply in China. An evidence of this is the reported price increase of poultry products in the recent weeks, the Reuters report added.
Industry officials feared that this trend will continue unless the disease outbreak is fully isolated and controlled.
Meanwhile, a major Chinese paper clarified that the African swine fever, though highly contagious, can only infect pigs. The virus won't catch on humans or other animal species, the agency added.
