South Korea confirms new case of African swine fever

SEOUL, South Korea—South Korea has confirmed a third case of African swine fever at a hog farm in a city near Seoul after the country’s first outbreak of the deadly virus last week, the agriculture ministry said on Monday.

The new case occurred at a pig farm with about 1,800 pigs in the city of Gimpo, nearly 14 km south of the city of Paju where the country’s first case was confirmed on Sept. 17, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement.

Since the first outbreak, over 15,000 pigs had been culled, according to the agriculture ministry data. That makes up 0.1 percent of the country’s pig population of above 12 million pigs.

South Korea, Asia’s fourth-largest economy, has raised the country’s animal disease alert level to the highest following the outbreak and ramped up disinfection measures to keep the virus spreading further.

African swine fever is highly contagious among pigs and nearly 100 percent fatal, but does not affect humans. It has spread across China including Vietnam and the Philippines.

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Hong Kong to cull 4,700 pigs after second swine fever case found

HONG KONG—Hong Kong will cull 4,700 pigs after African swine fever was detected in an animal at a slaughterhouse close to the border with China, the second such case in a month in the crowded financial hub. 

The animal came from a farm in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and importation from mainland China has been suspended until further notification, Sophia Chan, Secretary of the city's Food and Health Department said Friday night.

The government-run slaughterhouse in Sheung Shui will be closed for cleansing and disinfection, she added. 

Last month around 6,000 pigs were culled after the virus was detected in a pig imported from a farm in the same province. Supply from across the border was temporarily suspended for a week during the disinfection of slaughterhouse.

Pork is a staple of Chinese cuisine, with space-starved Hong Kong importing the majority of what it consumes from the mainland.

After African swine fever spread across more than half of China's provinces last year, Hong Kong banned imports from any Chinese farm where the virus had been detected.

Chinese officials have said hundreds of thousands of pigs were culled in a bid to stop its spread -- an effort that has also seen restrictions on transporting pigs from affected areas. 

With some of the world’s most densely populated streets, Hong Kong remains on high alert to diseases. In 2003, some 300 people died during an outbreak of severe acute respiratory disease.

The virus is not dangerous to humans but is fatal to pigs and wild boar.

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Vietnam swine fever cull surges, 1.7 million pigs dead

HANOI - Vietnam culled a further 500,000 pigs over the past two weeks to tackle an outbreak of African swine fever, taking the total killed so far to 1.7 million, or 5% of the country's herd, the agriculture ministry said on Monday.

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, first detected in the Southeast Asian country in February, has spread to 42 of the country's 63 provinces, the agriculture ministry's Livestock Production Department said in a statement on its website.

"The African swine fever outbreak is the most dangerous and costly of its kind in the husbandry industry of Vietnam," agriculture minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong said in the statement.

"Though the virus first appeared nearly 100 years ago, there has been no vaccine and no medicine for treating the disease".

China, the world's largest pork producer, which has also been hit by the virus, said on Friday it will start work on clinical trials of a vaccine for African swine fever, which is fatal to animals but not harmful to humans.

Cuong said it is difficult to contain the outbreak given that the virus remains dormant in the environment for a long time and can spread through complex and varied means.

Earlier this month, Vietnam said it will mobilize its military and police forces to help combat the outbreak.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in March advised Vietnam to declare the swine fever outbreak as a national emergency.

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Chinese food producer says swine fever found in dumplings

SHANGHAI -- A major Chinese food producer said Monday that traces of the African swine fever virus had been found in its frozen dumplings.

China, the world's biggest consumer and producer of pork, has struggled to contain an outbreak of the virus since the first cases were detected last August.

Officials have said hundreds of thousands of pigs were culled in a bid to stop its spread -- an effort that has also seen restrictions placed on moving pigs from affected areas.

Sanquan Food, based in central Henan province, issued a public statement confirming media reports published in recent days that contaminated pork dumplings were detected in two provinces that do not share a border.

The company said suspect batches of dumplings had reached grocery stores, but that it was sealing affected products and cooperating with authorities.

The statement did not mention a broader recall.

Unconfirmed Chinese media reports have said that products manufactured by several other companies also contained traces of the virus.

African swine fever is not harmful to humans but can be fatal to pigs, raising fears for the country's giant pork industry. 

But the media reports prompted anger online from Chinese consumers who vented over the latest in a recurring series of product scandals, despite repeated government promises to ensure safety.

Sanquan Food's share price dropped as much as 2.25 percent in Monday morning trading on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

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Dead pigs in China river exceed 13,000

SHANGHAI - The number of dead pigs found in a river running through China's commercial hub Shanghai had reached more than 13,000, the government and state media said Monday, as mystery deepened over the hogs' precise origin.

The Shanghai government said workers pulled 335 pigs out of the Huangpu river, which supplies 22 percent of the city's drinking water, on Monday, bringing the total to 9,795 since the infestation began earlier this month.

Shanghai has blamed farmers in Jiaxing in neighbouring Zhejiang province for dumping pigs which died of disease into the river upstream, where the official Xinhua news agency said another 3,601 dead animals had been recovered so far.

The Jiaxing government has said the area is not the sole source of the carcasses, adding it had found only one producer that could be held responsible.

Shanghai had checked farms in its southwestern district of Songjiang, where the pigs were first detected, but found they were not to blame, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said on Monday.

The scandal has spotlighted China's troubles with food safety, adding the country's most popular meat to a growing list of food items rocked by controversy.

Samples of the dead pigs have tested positive for porcine circovirus, a common swine disease that does not affect humans.

"Due to some farming households having a weak recognition of the law, bad habits, and lack of increased supervision and capability for treatment have led to the situation," the national agriculture ministry's chief veterinarian Yu Kangzhen said.

Yu attributed a higher mortality rate among pigs to colder weather this spring, though he ruled out an epidemic, the ministry said in statement posted on its website over the weekend.

The Shanghai government said in its statement that the quality of drinking water remained within national standards, despite widespread worries over water quality among the city's 23 million residents.

The thousands of dead pigs have drawn attention to China's poorly regulated farm production. Animals that die from disease can end up in the country's food supply chain or improperly disposed of, despite laws against the practice.

In Wenling, also in Zhejiang, authorities announced last week that 46 people had been jailed for up to six-and-a-half years for processing and selling pork from more than 1,000 diseased pigs.

China faced one its biggest food-safety scandals in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill.

In another recent incident, the American fast-food giant KFC faced controversy after revealing that some Chinese suppliers provided chicken with high levels of antibiotics, in what appeared to be an industry-wide practice.

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