China's agriculture ministry said yesterday it had called on local governments to report all new cases of a disease that some industry officials estimate has wiped out as many as a million pigs in China in the last year.
The move follows an outbreak last month near Yunfu City in Guangdong Province that led to death of some 300 pigs.
The illness has been identified as a strain of blue ear disease, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.
"It is the season for peak outbreaks. High temperature and humidity could cause even more outbreaks in the summer and autumn," the ministry said in a notice published on its Web site.
Officials have had difficulty determining how widespread the disease is because it had not been identified in earlier outbreaks and because of the disperse nature of China's pig industry, with many animals raised on small farms or by individual farmers.
The ministry has not said how many pigs have died from the disease since the first outbreak was reported a year ago in Jiangxi Province. But industry officials say the disease is now prevalent across the country, with estimates of pig deaths ranging from half a million to 1 million.
The disease, caused by a variation of the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome virus was first identified in the US in 1987, according to the Web site of the World Organization for Animal Health. It does not affect people, but the new strain has a higher mortality rate, said the ministry.
The ministry has successfully worked out a new type of vaccine against the disease and would speed up production to apply to pigs in some key suffering areas, it said. It did not elaborate.
The disease causes stillbirths in pigs, fever, loss of appetite, diarrhoea and redness of the skin. The ears of the affected pigs turn temporarily blue.
Mortality rates of as high as 50 percent had led farmers to abandon breeding and the reduction of the pig population has caused a heavy blow to the feed industry.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) launched a week-long diplomatic blitz of South America on Thursday by inaugurating a massive deep-water port in Peru, a US$1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent. With China’s demand for agricultural goods and metals from Latin America growing, Xi will participate in the APEC summit in Lima then head to the Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro next week, where he will also make a state visit to Brazil. Xi and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte participated on Thursday by video link in the opening
‘HARD-HEADED’: Some people did not evacuate to protect their property or because they were skeptical of the warnings, a disaster agency official said Typhoon Man-yi yesterday slammed into the Philippines’ most populous island, with the national weather service warning of flooding, landslides and huge waves as the storm sweeps across the archipelago nation. Man-yi was still packing maximum sustained winds of 185kph after making its first landfall late on Saturday on lightly populated Catanduanes island. More than 1.2 million people fled their homes ahead of Man-yi as the weather forecaster warned of a “life-threatening” effect from the powerful storm, which follows an unusual streak of violent weather. Man-yi uprooted trees, brought down power lines and smashed flimsy houses to pieces after hitting Catanduanes in the typhoon-prone
HOPEFUL FOR PEACE: Zelenskiy said that the war would ‘end sooner’ with Trump and that Ukraine must do all it can to ensure the fighting ends next year Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom early yesterday suspended gas deliveries via Ukraine, Vienna-based utility OMV said, in a development that signals a fast-approaching end of Moscow’s last gas flows to Europe. Russia’s oldest gas-export route to Europe, a pipeline dating back to Soviet days via Ukraine, is set to shut at the end of this year. Ukraine has said it would not extend the transit agreement with Russian state-owned Gazprom to deprive Russia of profits that Kyiv says help to finance the war against it. Moscow’s suspension of gas for Austria, the main receiver of gas via Ukraine, means Russia now only
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un renewed his call for a “limitless” expansion of his military nuclear program to counter US-led threats in comments reported yesterday that were his first direct criticism toward Washington since US president-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory on Oct. 6. At a conference with army officials on Friday, Kim condemned the US for updating its nuclear deterrence strategies with South Korea and solidifying three-way military cooperation involving Japan, which he portrayed as an “Asian NATO” that was escalating tensions and instability in the region. Kim also criticized the US over its support of Ukraine against a prolonged Russian invasion.
RSS