It was a question of when not if, African Swine Fever is escalating in Europe!
Bulgaria announces plans to slaughter 24,500 pigs in swine fever outbreak Bulgarian veterinary authorities said on Friday they would cull more than 24,000 pigs after detecting an outbreak of African swine fever at a pig farm in the northeast of the country. The outbreak is the first at an industrial farm since August 2019 when the virus hit six breeding farms in the Balkan country, forcing the vet authorities to cull almost 140,000 pigs from 42 outbreaks in 2019.
A report in November 2019 revealed there is not enough pork in the world’ to deal with China’s demand for meat. Hundreds of millions of pigs, 40% of the total have died or have been culled from swine fever, and the prices are soaring. A report by the Guardian claimed, since August 2018, when China notified the World Organisation for Animal Health that ASF (swine fever) was in the country, the disease has spread with extraordinary speed. Some 40% of Chinese pigs – hundreds of millions of animals – have now been lost, and the result has been a chronic shortage of pork and rocketing prices. The Chinese government has been forced to dig into its gigantic emergency reserves of frozen meat. “The producer price has risen 125% since July,” said Rupert Claxton of international food consultancy Girafood. Full story
Vietnam culled more than 1.2 million farmed pigs infected with African swine fever in May and the virus continues to spread rapidly in the Southeast Asian country. Pork accounts for three-quarters of total meat consumption in Vietnam, a country of 95 million people where most of its 30 million farm-raised pigs are consumed domestically. The virus was first detected in Vietnam in February and has spread to 29 provinces, including Dong Nai, which supplies around 40% of the pork consumed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's southern economic hub. "The risk of the virus spreading further is very high and the evolution of the outbreak is complicated," the government said in a statement. It said many provinces had failed to detect outbreaks and cull infected pigs properly due to a lack of funds and the space needed for burying the dead pigs. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in March advised Vietnam to declare the swine fever outbreak as a national emergency. Full story
Animal Die-Offs 2020
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very sad.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the way you keep animals 'bites' you. Considering such outbreaks, I feel for the abused animals which are mostly treated like things and commodities instead of living beings.
Many doctors strongly believe (based on 'human feeding' data) that increased meat consumption in Asia is greatly responsible for the rapidly increasing risk of chronic diseases that were previously only seen in the over-fed and over-meat-fed West.