The African swine fever virus has spread like wildfire in Chinese pig farms for several months. Franceinfo takes stock of this disease, which is causing meat prices to rise in many countries.
"It is the biggest animal epidemic on the planet ever." The African swine fever which rages in Asia worries a veterinary epidemiologist of the City University of Hong Kong in the columns of the Guardian (in English), Thursday, June 6. This makes the epidemics of foot-and-mouth disease and mad cow disease pale in comparison, "he insists. Franceinfo gives you the keys to understanding this epidemic with global consequences.
What is African swine fever?
"African swine fever [ASF] is a haemorrhagic viral disease which exclusively affects domestic pigs and wild boars", explains on its website the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES) .
If we speak of "African swine fever", it is because it was first discovered on the African continent. Originally, the ASF virus "is endemic in about twenty countries, from Senegal to Kenya", explains Sciences et Avenir. We find its trace for the first time in Kenya in 1921. "Warthogs and bush pigs, wild cousins of the pig, are the natural hosts of the virus", specifies the magazine. But this virus does not make them sick. However, this highly contagious disease "is generally fatal" for affected farm animals, writes the European Food Safety Authority.
This disease must be distinguished from classical swine fever (PCP). This, "in severe forms", can present "clinical manifestations [which] closely resemble those of African swine fever", explains the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in this PDF document. The major difference is that there is a vaccine against classical swine fever, unlike African swine fever.
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/asie/l-article-a-lire-pour-comprendre-l-epidemie-de-peste-porcine-qui-sevit-en-asie_3479583.html
At the same time:
Swine fever: China accused of burying infected pigs alive
The photos or videos put online by rare witnesses, and published by foreign media, cause nausea. Some show a long line of battered trucks in which hundreds of pigs pile up in appalling conditions; others show pigs swayed like sacks in deep pits lined with tarpaulins. The backhoe loaders and the huge heaps of earth accumulated around the pits leave little doubt about the fate that awaits the animals trapped, totally panicked.
To read also all our chronicles around animals
Even if caution is required as to the date and place of shooting of these documents, several sources agree that faced with the progression of African swine fever (ASF), which now affects half a dozen countries from Asia, some do not hesitate to bury infected animals alive. Among the 5 million pigs already slaughtered or died from this disease (FAO figure, August 2019), how many have experienced this terrible death? Impossible to know. However, it is in China, where this highly contagious and deadly virus for pigs and wild boars has been raging for a year, that this practice is most widespread. It must be said that China, the world's largest producer and consumer of pigs, has a whopping 26 million pigsties. While most of them are of modest size, others, real HLMs with breeding, include several floors, each level housing up to a thousand pigs.
https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/09/29/peste-porcine-la-chine-accusee-d-enterrer-vivants-des-cochons-infectes_1754177