Battling African Swine Fever
Battling African Swine Fever
African Swine Fever is spreading. Recently, Bulgaria's Food Safety Agency is the latest to confirm another case.
Some 24,000 animals will be destroyed as a result, a precaution to keep the disease from spreading further.
Paul Sundberg of the Swine Health Information Center says - the US is taking steps to insure we keep the disease from spreading into our nations herds.
Unfortunately for China, African swine fever has swept across the country, affecting hundreds of millions of pigs. The fever is caused by a highly contagious and deadly virus, for which there is no vaccine. The virus likely spread from Russia, whose farmers had already battled it for over a year. The first reported fever outbreak in China occurred in Liaoning in August 2018. It swiftly spread to Inner Mongolia a month later. By December 2018, it reached Guangdong in southern China. Then by April 2019, it reached Tibet and Xinjiang in western China. Since then, there have been hundreds of fever outbreaks across China.
