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.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens living at home and abroad would receive a payout of about US$478 each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind-boggling” oil wealth. The grant of 100,000 Guyanese dollars would be available to any citizen of the South American country aged 18 and older with a valid passport or identification card. Guyanese citizens who normally live abroad would be eligible, but must be in Guyana to collect the payment. The payout was originally planned as a 200,000 Guyanese dollar grant for each household in the country, but was reframed after concerns that some citizens, including
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS