Death by China

China swine fever prompts UN emergency meeting 
Outbreak that led to culling of 40,000 pigs could spread to neighbouring countries 
By Hudson Lockett in Hong Kong and Tom Hancock in Nanjing

A series of African Swine Fever outbreaks that prompted Chinese officials to cull tens of thousands of pigs this summer could spread to neighbouring countries in Asia, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned.
 The FAO convened an emergency meeting in Bangkok on Wednesday of health experts, regulators and industry participants from China and eight neighbouring countries to develop a regional response to east Asia’s first outbreak of the disease.
 While ASF is not a direct threat to human health it is highly contagious and has a high mortality rate among pigs, and so can have devastating impacts on meat producers.
 “It’s critical that this region be ready for the very real possibility that ASF could jump the border into other countries,” said Wantanee Kalpravidh, regional manager in Asia for the FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases.
“That’s why this emergency meeting has been convened.”
 China has seen eight outbreaks of the disease stretching from the first discovered in the country’s north-east at the beginning of August down to the province of Zhejiang that borders Shanghai, leading to the deaths of hundreds of pigs.
 The FAO said officials in China, which produces roughly half the world’s pigs annually, had culled as many as 40,000 swine in an attempt to control the disease. 
 The culls, combined with limits on the transportation of animals around China, have pushed up pork prices in the country more than 5 per cent since the beginning of August, according to official figures, adding to inflationary pressures as a trade war with the US drives up prices of soyabeans, a key ingredient in animal feed.
The rapid “diverse geographical spread” of the fever in China has compounded fears that the disease could move to neighbouring south-east Asian countries or the Korean peninsula, the FAO said in a separate statement late last month.
 A “much larger” number of pigs will probably have to be slaughtered in China over the next few weeks, further affecting pork prices, said Dirk Pfeiffer, an animal health expert at the City University of Hong Kong.
 “We need to closely monitor the situation on the mainland, and in particular any imports of live pigs and pork products. We need to aim to get assurance that any live pigs are from areas demonstrated to be free from infection,” he added.
 Experts are unsure how the disease spread to China.
Theories include imported meats and the overall increase in travel and trade between China and Africa.