Spain has found another seven dead wild boars infected with African swine fever near Barcelona, increasing the outbreak’s total to nine cases, the agriculture ministry said on Tuesday.
The discovery of two cases in boars last week in the Collserola Natural Park, Spain’s first since 1994, has sparked fears for the country’s powerful pork export industry.
More than 100 members of the army’s emergencies unit, Catalan regional officials and EU experts are working to uncover new cases and contain the disease, harmless for humans but devastating for pigs.
Laboratory tests have confirmed that seven wild boars found dead in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Valles were infected, “very close” to where the first two boars were discovered, the ministry said in a statement.
But pig farms in a 20-kilometre (12-mile) radius around the infected area were tested “without the detection of symptoms or compatible lesions”, the statement added.
The European Commission’s Veterinary Emergency Team joined the emergency response on Tuesday “to assess the measures deployed on the ground and issue recommendations” with the aim of controlling the disease “as soon as possible”, said the ministry.
Any spread of the disease to farms could seriously harm the world’s third-largest producer of pork and pork derivatives.
Spain exports almost three million tonnes each year to more than 100 countries, but Agriculture Minister Luis Planas has said a third of them have halted imports as a safety measure.
Planas welcomed on Monday the decision of China — the top export market for Spanish pork — to continue accepting imports from outside the Barcelona region.
African swine fever is also present in the Baltic states and eastern Europe, where it arrived from Russia in 2014.
Add Comment