Second African swine fever case detected
Print Edition
CHINA found its second case of African swine fever (ASF) yesterday at a slaughterhouse owned by WH Group’s Chinese unit.
Some 30 hogs died of the disease at the slaughterhouse in Zhengzhou, capital of central China’s Henan Province, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement. The pigs had traveled thousands of kilometers from a farm in Jiamusi in northeastern Heilongjiang Province, it said.
The ministry has sent teams to both Henan and Heilongjiang.
Henan has initiated an emergency response mechanism to block, cull and disinfect the affected pigs.
Local authorities suspended operations and sealed off the slaughterhouse, controlled by China’s largest pork processor Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development, a subsidiary of WH Group, a WH spokeswoman confirmed.
The outbreak comes almost two weeks after another northeastern province, Liaoning, culled thousands of pigs after the discovery of the first case of ASF.
The agriculture ministry did not name the company in Zhengzhou, but Shuanghui Investment & Development reported earlier yesterday that it had discovered a suspected case of the disease, a director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau said.
Heilongjiang authorities were investigating whether the pigs were infected in the province bordering Russia. The provincial veterinary official said it wasn’t clear where or how the pigs in Zhengzhou caught the disease.
“We sent two batches of experts from (Heilongjiang) province and the central government to Tangyuan this morning, where the suspected outbreak was reported,” the official said. Tangyuan is a county in Jiamusi.
Shuanghui has diverted orders from its Zhengzhou operations and is cooperating with the authorities to contain the disease, a staff in the media relations department of Shuanghui said.
Neighboring factories will supplement supplies and sales from the slaughterhouse during its suspension. Shuanghui’s production capacity and production in the region will not be affected, the WH spokeswoman said.
The pigs in question did not enter the slaughtering process because the problem, later identified as ASF, was discovered before that, she added.
After the first outbreak in Liaoning, which was also the first in East Asia, Japan suspended imports of heat-treated Chinese pork and has tightened quarantine operations at airports and seaports.
The vast distance the pigs in Henan traveled — some 2,300 kilometers southwest from Heilongjiang to central China — highlights the challenge for the government in controlling the highly contagious disease in the country’s vast hog population and beyond its borders.
Henan is China’s second-largest pig producer, and is a big supplier to nearby Shandong, Sichuan and Hubei provinces.
The disease is the latest blow to Chinese hog farmers, who have been struggling with a prolonged rout as years of frenzied investment to boost production have created oversupply, with output well beyond stagnating domestic demand.
ASF is one of the most devastating diseases to affect swine herds. It occurs among pigs and wild boars, transmitted by ticks and direct contact between animals, and its effects are often deadly. There is no vaccine. The disease does not affect humans.
Shuanghui, headquartered in Henan’s Luohe, has 15 slaughterhouses, with a total annual capacity of 30 million hogs, and 23 production bases across China, spanning from Heilongjiang to the southern province of Guangdong. It sells more than 3 million tons of pork a year.
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