Unidentified virus decimates China's pig population

CHENGDU, China: A highly infectious swine virus is sweeping China's pig population, driving up pork prices and spawning fears of a global pandemic among domesticated pigs.

So far, the mysterious virus, believed to be an unusually deadly form of an infection known as blue-ear pig disease, has spread to 25 of this country's 33 provinces and regions.

The government in Beijing acknowledged that in the past year, the virus had decimated pig stocks in southern and coastal areas. But animal virus experts said that the Chinese authorities were playing down the gravity and spread of the outbreak, and had refused to cooperate with international scientists.

"They haven't really explained what this virus is," said Federico Zuckermann, a professor of immunology at the College of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Illinois. "This is like SARS. They haven't sent samples to any international body. This is really irresponsible of China. This thing could get out and affect everyone."

Experts said the virus was rapidly moving from the coasts to inland and the west, to areas like this one in Sichuan Province, China's largest pork producing region. The situation is grave because China consumes half the world's pork and considers pork its primary source of protein.

"This disease is like a wind that swept in and passed from village to village," said Ding Shurong, a 45-year-old farmer who lost two-thirds of his pigs to the disease in a village near here. "I've never seen anything like it. No family was left untouched. Everyone got hit."

No one knows for sure how many of the country's 500 million pigs have been infected by the virus. But the resulting pork shortage has helped fuel the strongest inflation in China in a decade, and even set off panic selling of pigs by farmers worried that they will suffer severe losses if their livestock contract the disease.

The government in Beijing said that about 165,000 pigs had contracted the virus this year. But in a country that, on average, loses 25 million pigs a year to disease, few believe the figures, particularly when pork prices have skyrocketed by more than 85 percent in the past year and field experts are reporting widespread disease outbreaks.

"No one believes the numbers the government publishes," said Hua Xiangbai, who teaches at Jiangxi Agricultural University.

Indeed, international health experts were already calling this one of the worst disease outbreaks ever to hit Asia's livestock industry, and they feared the fast-mutating disease could easily spread to neighboring countries, igniting a worldwide epidemic that could affect pork supplies everywhere.

A similar virus has already been detected in neighboring Vietnam and Myanmar, and health experts are now trying to determine whether it crossed Chinese borders.

The government recently issued alarming reports that farmers were selling diseased or infected pigs to illegal slaughterhouses, which could pose food safety problems.

While there are no clear indications blue-ear disease poses a threat to human health, some animal virus experts said China had not been forthcoming with information about the disease or the damage it had inflicted on the country, perhaps out of fear of creating a larger panic, at home and abroad.

Health experts said China had declined to send tissue samples to testing labs outside the country for independent verification by a lab affiliated with the World Organization for Animal Health, in Paris. The Chinese government insisted that the disease was under control and that a vaccine had been developed and distributed.

But some scientists said there was no truly effective vaccine against blue-ear pig disease (which is also known as Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome); other experts said they were not even certain the virus gripping the country was blue-ear pig disease.

"This is the most rapidly evolving virus I've ever studied," said Trevor Drew, head of virology at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in England. "The Chinese are saying they have definitive proof, but as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on what this disease is."

Concerned the disease could spread to neighboring countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was pressing China to share its research and tissue samples.

Scientists who track blue-ear pig disease said they were puzzled because the disease was generally not so deadly.

"This virus generally makes them ill but on its own it doesn't cause a lot of deaths," said Steven McOrist, a professor of hog medicines at the University of Nottingham in England. "I've been working with pigs for 30 years. The evidence they put up so far is not conclusive."

[link to www.iht.com]