The Swine Health Information Center suggests an outbreak of African Swine Fever in wild boar in Sweden is cause to consider the potential implications of the human mediated transport of infected pork products.
The Swine Health Information Center's global and domestic swine disease surveillance report, released as part of its October eNewsletter, outlines several new outbreaks of African Swine Fever, highlighting the outbreak in Sweden.
SHIC Associate Director Dr. Megan Niederwerder notes ASF was detected for the first time in Sweden last month, in wild boar only, and 41 animals have been confirmed infected.
Quote-Dr. Megan Niederwerder-Swine Health Information Center:
The association of ASF in Sweden has been discussed because certainly this was a long-distance jump.The hypotheses are that this associated with human mediated transport.
Again, very important with regards to global spread of ASF and the ability to have long distance spread with regards to human mediated movement. In Sweden they have initiated several control measure measures to try and eliminate this virus post introduction into the wild boar, putting up barriers and thinking about hunting and how do you eliminate the wild boar that are infected and to restrict and prevent disease transmission to their domestic herd, but gain, very difficult.
The other aspect that we have to think about is when you consider human mediated transport of infected pork products, certainly high biosecurity farms will not allow pork products to come into their sites.
Though, when you consider that when they're feral or wild boar, those animals are scavenging and will consume contaminated pork products. So, we have to think about reducing the risk through human mediated spread and thinking again about the risk of those contaminated pork products in the global epidemiology of ASF.
SHIC's global and domestic swine disease surveillance reports can be accessed through swinehealth.org.
Source : Farmscape.ca