I don’t know about the rest of you all, but I’m getting tired of this pandemic situation. Who would have thought that modern society, which makes a serious effort to keep an eye on deadly viruses, would nearly shut down the world economy? Seems like there is a deadly virus that threatens some part of the world every year and takes a bunch of people to figure it out and create a defense for it.
When it comes to animal health and zoonotic diseases, we, in the U.S. get right after it. Exterminate the infected subjects, quarantine herds, and then figure out a way to get rid of it; it’s a common occurrence.
I’m reasonably convinced that China did botch up the COVID-19 virus that caused a global pandemic. From what I’ve read about how they handled the African swine fever (ASF), it’s clear that China doesn’t have as good a handle on this as they would like us to think. There must be a common denominator with coronavirus and ASF, at least for how they handled the onset of the virus.
China has experienced a level of swine fever that has decimated their national hog herd. China’s 440 million-head hog herd has been halved in about 18 months. China is the largest producer of pork in the world and it is the preferred protein in the country. Hogs are grown everywhere and under a wide variety of conditions. They certainly don’t have similar hygiene to the U.S.
After reading a Reuters article on how swine fever was managed in China, I can’t help thinking that they have not handled the coronavirus well at all. China apparently reported all their data on COVID-19 to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has been accused of sitting on the data, and endorsing China’s handling of the virus outbreak. President Donald Trump announced last week that the U.S. would not support the WHO any longer because of their politics and leadership.
My first problem with the WHO is that it is a United Nations (UN) organization. In my opinion, the UN is a sham, especially on human rights. When dictators are leading the UN’s human rights committee, that should be a bright red light.
Back to swine fever, I can’t believe that China authorities would put a major component of their food supply at risk. But a recent article from Reuters news agency clears up a few things. First paragraph, “When the deadly virus (swine fever) was first discovered in China, authorities told the people in the know to keep quiet or else. Fearing reprisal from Beijing, local officials failed to order tests to confirm outbreaks and didn’t properly warn the public as the pathogen spread death around the country.”
Just because people don’t want to get in trouble with the government, they kept swine fever under raps for months. We learned about it about a year ago, and then followed reports as the virus spread, infecting more and more, and ended up killing hundreds of millions of hogs. The virus does not infect people. and there is no vaccine to combat the pathogen, so it could spread freely. I do understand they are close to having a vaccine for the hogs.
China did just about everything wrong with swine fever. They covered it up for starters, then failed to compensate farmers who liquidated infected herds. They didn’t quarantine areas of outbreak and they allowed livestock transportation to continue to operate without disinfecting equipment.
ASF has been spotted in 10 Asian countries and is believed to be in eastern Europe and Russia. Some prognosticators say it’s a matter of time before it shows up in the U.S. Ironically, U.S. customs picked up 20,000 pounds of fresh Chinese pork at the port of Los Angeles recently, and we’ve herd antidotal stories of meat smuggling from China.
I suppose the question remains: Does anyone trust China? U.S. agriculture is desperately hoping Trump won’t mess with the Phase One trade deal out of COVID-19 spite. Agriculture has moved lots of product to China over the past several months. But China has told state-owned companies to back off importing. I just hope there are enough private food importers to keep the pipeline full.
My feeling is if China needs the food, they will buy it from us because we have safe meat. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to trust them. — PETE CROW
