If you like eating pork, it may soon be in short supply and much more expensive. Asia is no stranger to animal and bird diseases, but what has been called "Pig Ebola" is rapidly marching through Asia.
“This is the biggest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had on the planet,” said Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at City University of Hong Kong and expert on African swine fever. “It makes the foot and mouth disease and BSE outbreaks pale in comparison to the damage that is being done. And we have no way to stop it from spreading.”
The highly contagious African Swine Fever is harmless to humans but causes pigs to haemorrhage until they die. There is no known vaccine and no known cure. The only way of trying to control the disease is by culling huge numbers of pigs. Since it first appeared in China last August, 1.2 million pigs have been slaughtered. A further 80 million may eventually find the same fate. The virus is carried on almost anything from clothing to vehicles, allowing it to travel long distances quickly.
It has spread like wildfire across Asia, causing growing devastation to the pig farmers of Vietnam and Cambodia and putting Thailand, Asia’s second-biggest pork producer, on “red alert”. Cases have increased in Mongolia, North Korea and Hong Kong in recent weeks, while South Korea is blood testing pigs at the border.
The UN Food and Agriculture organisation (UNFAO) and regional experts fear that Myanmar, Philippines and Laos will be next because they are all highly susceptible to an outbreak, due to the struggle to control the movement of pigs and pig products across porous borders.
It may not yet have arrived in Thailand but that is unlikely to continue.
Pfeiffer was not optimistic Thailand – which has more than 2m pigs – could resist the pandemic spreading from neighbouring Vietnam and Cambodia, or China, for much longer, saying it could probably enter “through pork products brought in illegally from Vietnam and China, even if just by tourists or truck drivers”.
“The virus survives so well and there are so many people travelling particularly between China and Thailand, it’s hard to see how it could be contained for much longer,” he added.
The rest of the world is not immune to the effect of this deadly disease.
The implications of the outbreak are already being felt beyond Asia. Global pork prices have risen by almost 40%, and long term it is likely to lead to more pork imports from Europe and America to meet demand, which will also push up global meat prices.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... -thailand-