World Hog news:

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Patchy Pig Monitoring May Hide Flu Threat
GLOBAL - Public-health experts are warning that a lack of surveillance may be allowing the 2009 pandemic H1N1 flu virus to go undetected in pigs. This raises the risk that the virus could circulate freely between humans and pigs, making it more likely to re-assort into a deadlier strain, they say.



Pig surveillance is largely the remit of animal-health organizations, agriculture ministries and the farming industry. Their main concern tends to be that any reports of the pandemic virus in pigs might provoke overreactions such as the mass culling of pigs that took place in Egypt, or trade bans on pigs and pork. Within minutes of the World Health Organization (WHO) announcement on 11 June that swine flu had become a pandemic, Bernard Vallat, director-general of an intergovernmental trade body, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), had reiterated that trade sanctions were unjustified. "So far the role of animals has not been demonstrated in the virus's epidemiology or spread," he asserted.

But some experts say that is an artefact of patchy to non-existent flu surveillance in pigs. In a paper published last week (G. J. D. Smith et al. Nature advance online publication doi: 10.1038/nature08182; 2009), Gavin Smith, a flu geneticist at the University of Hong Kong, and his colleagues concluded that "the lack of systematic swine surveillance allowed for the undetected persistence and evolution of this potentially pandemic strain for many years". The virus originated from a mixture of swine flu strains, and pigs are an "obvious" part of the epidemiology of the new virus, says Smith. Yet the number of swine-flu sequences in the international GenBank database is about a tenth of that for avian flu viruses. Circulation of the virus between pigs and humans is "definitely a possibility", he adds.

The pandemic virus has so far been found in pigs from just one farm, in Alberta, Canada, where it spread throughout the herd. But noone has been able to pin down how the herd became infected. Scientists at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, UK, have shown that pigs can easily become infected with the virus, and readily transmit it between themselves and shed it into the environment. Past pandemic viruses have also gone on to become endemic in pig populations.

"It's absolutely surprising that a virus this contagious in both humans and swine, and which has been reported in humans in 76 countries, has only been reported in one swine farm in Canada," says Jimmy Smith, head of livestock affairs at the World Bank in Washington DC, and a member of the organization's flu task force. "It is highly likely that more pigs are infected in more places."

Absence of evidence of the pandemic virus in pig populations is not evidence of absence, concedes Steve Edwards, chairman of the OIE–FAO Network of Expertise on Animal Influenza (OFFLU), which coordinates work done by animal-flu surveillance labs worldwide, and former chief executive of the Veterinary Laboratories Agency. "But we should not assume it is there until we have evidence to say so," he insists.

Whereas flu surveillance has improved over the past six years in poultry and wild birds, pigs have been below the radar, says Ilaria Capua, an animal-flu expert at the Experimental Animal Health Care Institute of Venice in Legnaro, Italy. The avian H5N1 flu virus leads to serious disease in poultry and causes huge economic losses, so the OIE requires its 174 member states to report any outbreaks. In pigs, flu viruses, although common, tend to cause only mild disease, so there is no obligation to report cases of swine flu, much less take samples for genetic and antigenic analysis. The OIE has, however, asked its member states to voluntarily report any occurrences of the 2009 pandemic virus in pigs.

"Surveillance for swine flu is not something that has been high on the agenda of government services," says Mr Edwards. "It is seen as a farming-industry problem." Most flu surveillance in pigs is passive, relying on farmers or vets sending material to government labs. Active targeted surveillance with diagnostic tests is rarer, as it is more expensive.

OFFLU has called on labs worldwide to share what information they have on swine flu, and to sequence any samples they have obtained recently. So far, however, the response has been "limited", says Mr Edwards.

A meeting between experts from OFFLU and the WHO on 21 May — the conclusions of which were made public last week — recommended scaling up flu surveillance efforts in pigs, and OFFLU is now developing sampling and diagnostic protocols. Recommendations are all very well, but "somebody has to agree to fund all of this work", warns Mr Edwards.

Ironically, European Union funding for one of the world's largest pig surveillance networks expired in March, reports Naturenews. The European Surveillance Network for Influenza in Pigs, which was created in 2001, comprises nine European labs and one in Hong Kong. Although the network has not yet detected the new virus in pigs, its coordinator Kristien Van Reeth, an animal virologist at Ghent University in Belgium, admits that participating labs have taken just a few hundred to a thousand samples each over the past year. Network members hope that with the pandemic highlighting the need for better pig surveillance, new funding will be forthcoming.

It is now clear that the animal-and public-health communities underestimated the potential for pigs to generate a pandemic virus. Although pigs can be infected with many subtypes of flu, the three most common endemic strains are H1N1, H1N2 and H3N2. Most expected that any new pandemic would involve the introduction of a viral subtype not previously seen in humans, such as the avian H5 subtype, explains Capua. "The consensus was that a pandemic could not be caused by H1, H2 or H3 because the current human population would have antibodies against them," she says.

The emergence of the reassorted H1N1 pandemic virus — which current research indicates noone has any immunity to, apart, perhaps, from some people older than 60 — has changed that thinking. Moreover, Nature has learned that the international community was warned of such a risk in a presentation at a closed meeting between the OIE, the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Paris in February. In the presentation, the results of which are in press at the journal PLoS Pathogens, Capua showed that serum samples from people vaccinated against seasonal flu strains showed little or no cross reactivity against H1, H2 and H3 bird viruses, meaning that they would have no immunity.

This shows that the world needs a comprehensive surveillance system of all influenza subtypes and their evolution across many animal species, says Capua: "We should be looking at the bigger picture."

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China Struggling with Pig Overpopulation
CHINA - It seems the United States is not the only country struggling with an oversupply of pork.

China has started buying frozen pork for its government reserves to relieve an oversupply of live pigs that has driven live pig and pork prices below breakeven, according to the official Chinese news service Xinhua.

Statistics released by China's National Development and Reform Commission Price Monitoring Center showed that average live pig prices in major cities across China over the past four weeks fell by 3.75 per cent while wholesale corn prices advanced 1.2 per cent, dropping the pig feed price ratio below breakeven, Xinhua reported.

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Pork Industry Not Backing Quarantine Reforms
AUSTRALIA - Livestock exporters are calling on cross-benchers and the Opposition to support the Federal Government's new quarantine fee structure.



The Federal Government has released details of its biosecurity reform package and details of fees, but they still need Senate approval, reports ABC.

The government will remove the 40 per cent export subsidy next month, as recommended by the Beale review into Australia's quarantine procedures.

Lach McKinnon, from the Australian Livestock Exporters' Council, says industry has agreed to the fees in order to see vital quarantine reforms happen.

"In regards to cost of export certifications, there will be increases for exporters, but the reforms that we're putting forward will definitely outweigh the increase in fees and charges," he says.

The new fee structure will be tabled in the Senate on Monday and could be disallowed within 15 sitting days.

Western Australian pork processors say they'll be worse off under the government's new quarantine fee structure.

Over half of Australia's pork exports to South-East Asia come from WA, and processors fear additional costs will make the industry uncompetitive against rival pork exporters Canada, Denmark and the USA.

David Lock, from agribusiness company Craig Mostyn Group, says the entire supply chain will be affected.

"There is the potential that other countries will be preferred suppliers, which will have an impact right back to growers, where we are unable to pay growers as much as we would have, or there is a reduced supply because our costs are too high."

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Swine Fever Could Devastate Aussie Pig Population
AUSTRALIA - Australian experts are warning that an outbreak of the pig disease 'swine fever' could easily and rapidly spread across Australia.



According to The Medical News, the researchers at the University of Western Australia Institute of Agriculture (UWA) say swine fever, which is unrelated to swine flu, could easily spread to Australia's domesticated pigs by way of the feral pig population.

Australia’s has as many as 20 million feral pigs and a classical swine fever outbreak, starting in north Queensland, could spread widely across Australia, potentially posing a risk to Australia’s domestic pig population.

The team at UWA, led by Professor George Milne of the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, developed a computer model which simulated the effect of wild pigs moving across the landscape and according to the model, given the right seasonal conditions, swine fever could spread among feral pigs and become endemic and virtually impossible to eradicate in Australia.

Professor Milne says the time of the outbreak and seasonal factors are absolutely critical to how quickly the disease could spread and the greatest danger of a rapidly spreading epidemic is at the start of the dry season, when feral pigs gather around water sources.

Professor Milne says it is known that male pigs travel great distances and can therefore spread the disease far and wide, and any effective strategy to combat an outbreak during the dry season would have to involve targeting adult male herds.

Dr. Darryl D’Souza, General Manager, Research and Innovation at Australian Pork Limited, believes that swine fever could have a devastating impact on the pig industry through increasing mortality and morbidity and reducing reproductive performance.

Dr. D’Souza says swine fever was last reported in Australia in 1961 and it is vital that any outbreak in feral pigs is controlled quickly, as it poses a serious threat to Australia’s two-and-a-half million domestic pigs and an industry annually contributing almost $1 billion to the Australian economy.

Dr. D’Souza says prediction models are excellent tools and will certainly assist the industry to predict swine fever outbreaks and effective management strategies.

Dr. D’Souza says classical swine fever was not related to the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, which is not present in Australian pigs and which the World Health Organisation assures cannot be spread by eating properly handled and prepared pork.

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China Takes H1N1 Trade Related Measures
CHINA - According to the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), China notified the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 5 June that it has banned the import of pig meat and products from areas of Mexico and the US, where there have been cases of influenza A/H1N1.

 

On 5 June 2009, China notified the WTO of “Joint Public Notice No. 31 of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the Ministry of Agriculture on Prevention of Mexican and US Swine Influenza from Entering China” as G/SPS/N/CHN/116 and “Joint Public Notice No. 36 of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the Ministry of Agriculture on Prevention of US Ohio and New York Swine Influenza from Entering China” as G/SPS/N/CHN/117. The two measures forbid direct and indirect importation swine and swine products from Mexico and US and suspend the issuance of the Entry Animal and Plant Quarantine Permits for products from those places in which A/H1N1 has occurred. The measures become effective on the date of announcement, 26 April and 29 April respectively.

The States of Texas, California, and Kansas in the United States are banned in Joint Public Notice No.31 (issued on 26 April) and New York State and Ohio are banned in Joint Public Notice No.36 (issued on 29 April). According to Notice No.36, if new cases of human swine influenza are found in other states in the United States, newly infected states will be automatically included in the list of swine and swine product ban. Thus, due to the expansion of A/H1N1 influenza cases, all fifty US states have now been effectively banned.

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PM Putin Drops by Store and Raps Pork Prices
RUSSIA - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to a Perekryostok supermarket on Wednesday evening and won a promise from the chain's managing director to cut prices on pork.



Prime Minister Putin's field trip to the dairy and meat aisles of the supermarket in the Krylatskoye district of western Moscow came amid a government drive to develop new trade legislation, specifically state regulation over retail pricing.

Perekryostok is a midprice supermarket chain that belongs to the X5 retail group, reports The Moscow Times.com.

"How much is pork?" Prime Minister Putin asked astounded store attendants, Interfax reported.

Seeing a price tag of 335 rubles ($11) and consulting a pricing table that listed the item's purchase price as 160 rubles, Putin's calculation yielded an unhappy result.

"This is double the price. Is that normal?" the prime minister asked Yury Kobaladze, the managing director of X5.

"Is 120 per cent a high markup?" Mr Kobaladze asked.

"Very high," Putin said.

"It will be lowered tomorrow," Mr Kobaladze said.

Prime Minister Putin also visited the dairy aisle.

The unannounced excursion to the store came during a government discussion over legislation to introduce a single set of rules for wholesale, supply and retail chain companies as well as to introduce special rules for the sale of agricultural products.

The delegation also included First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, Wimm-Bill-Dann chairman David Yakobashvili, Miratorg agro-holding president Viktor Linnik and Irina Kanunnikova, director of the Russian Union of Independent Retail Chains. After the 10 to 15 minute visit, Putin said goodbye to the customers and the store managers and returned to the White House to continue the meeting.

Officials have struck a populist note in recent weeks over food pricing as 75 per cent of Russians view growing prices as the country's biggest problem, according to a Levada survey released Tuesday.

Inflation has hit 7.2 per cent since the beginning of the year, according to State Statistics Service figures posted on its web site Wednesday. The government predicts that inflation could still be less than 13 per cent for the year, Central Bank chief Sergei Ignatyev said Wednesday.

President Dmitry Medvedev sang the praises of Russian-made food in an interview broadcast on Channel One television on Sunday. He said his family "prefers Russian products," but also expressed alarm at the "middlemen, sometimes legal and sometimes criminal" who "seriously increase the price" of food.

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Chinese Scientists Succeed in Pig Gender Selection
CHINA - Chinese scientists have claimed a commercial breakthrough after breeding 10 piglets whose sex was successfully selected before conception, heralding potential higher profits for farmers.



The healthy piglets were born last week on an experimental farm belonging to the Animal Science Institute in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the institute's top zoologist Lu Kehuan said yesterday.

"They were the first pigs in China bred from sperm sorted into male or female chromosomes," he said.

The piglets were born in two broods, an all-male brood of six on last Thursday and an all-female brood of four on Saturday.

Lu and his team separated sperm with the female X chromosome from sperm with the male Y chromosome, and used artificial insemination techniques to transplant the separated sperm into four sows. "Two of them gave birth after 115 days and the other two are due to give birth soon."

Lu said the "custom-tailored" piglets were no different from other newborn pigs in terms of weight and appetite. But the technique is expected to help farmers manipulate the birth rate of pigs and upgrade the quality of their species, he said.

Under normal circumstances, the average gender proportion of male and female piglets is 50:50, reports ShanghaiDaily.com.

"On many pig farms in south China, a young boar is about 5,000 yuan (US$715) more expensive than a sow. An all-male brood of six therefore brings an additional 15,000 yuan," said Lu.

Lu and his colleagues reported their first success in buffalo sex selection in 2006, when two female calves were born with X-bearing sperm.

The technology is widely used today on cows in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, whose vast pastures nurtures quality cows and milk.

"Theoretically, the same technique works on all mammals, including human beings," said Dr Zeng Youquan, a member of Lu's project team. "But for legal and ethical reasons, we haven't considered applying it to humans."

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H1N1 Flu Hits Pig Farm in Argentina
ARGENTINA - The veterinary authorities have sent a report to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) about an outbreak of influenza A H1N1 on a pig farm near Buenos Aires.



The Argentinian veterinary authority sent an Immediate Notification dated 25 June to the OIE.

The farm is at San Andrés de Giles in Buenos Aires province. The outbreak started on 15 June on a farm with 5,586 pigs, of which 1,676 were affected. The report states that the farm has with biosecurity measures in place and its own restocking system; a 4.5-hectares area. There are no other animal species in the farm. The distribution of the animals is as follows: 516 sows, seven hogs, 2,900 castrated pigs, 58 young sows and 2,105 sucking pigs.

The report adds that between 7 and 9 June 2009, two workers of the farm showed flu signs but they did not consult a doctor nor made diagnostic tests. The farm has its own restocking system. The last entry of animals occurred in July 2008. The farm applies biosecurity measures and the animals only leave the farm for slaughter. The source of infection is under investigation.

Since 24 June 2009, no clinical signs have been observed in the animals at the farm, according to the report.

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H1N1 Virus May be Hiding in Argentina's Pigs
ARGENTINA - An investigation of the recent H1N1 flu outbreak in pigs has led the authorities to suggest that the virus may have jumped back to pigs, providing a hidden virus reservoir.



According to reports from Argentina's National Agricultural Health and Quality Service, the pandemic swine flu virus has been transferred back to pigs.

Citing this Service, European Biotechnology Science and Industry News reports that almost a quarter of the animals at a pig farm near Buenos Aires carried an unmodified form of the influenza A(H1N1) virus.

Currently the disease is no more dangerous than the current non-mutated form in humans, causing mild symptoms in most cases with a low mortality rate (0.5 per cent of infections). However, it also almost exclusively infects young people, who often do not develop fever.

Experts are now warning that the transfer could point to a hidden reservoir of the virus in pigs, which brings the danger that mutations to a more severe phenotype could go unrecognised for longer periods. Past flu pandemics in 1918/19 ('Spanish flu'), 1956/57 ('Asian flu'), and 1968/69 ('Hongkong flu') were all marked by a mild first wave of infection followed by the spread of altered virus strains that caused life-threatening illness.

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Argentine Workers Suspected of Passing Flu to Pigs
ARGENTINA - Workers at an Argentine farm apparently infected pigs with the new H1N1 flu strain, only the second suspected case of humans passing the deadly virus to swine, a government spokesman said yesterday.



The World Health Organization declared a pandemic last month in an effort to control the spread of the flu virus, which first appeared in the United States and Mexico, but has since spread across the world and killed more than 300 people.

Genetic tests have shown the new H1N1 strain is clearly a pig virus and not a human virus, although people are catching it from other people and not from animals.

However, the Argentine case adds weight to the theory that pigs can be infected by humans.

In Canada, a farm worker was suspected of passing the virus to a herd of pigs. Blood testing later cleared him but health officials did not rule out the possibility that a human infected the animals.

"Our theory is that the pigs were infected by the farm workers who had had flu symptoms a week before the pigs started to show symptoms," the Argentine government farm spokesman said. Argentine government spokesmen generally ask not to be named.

He said 800 pigs had tested positive for H1N1 flu, but that the two workers suspected of passing the virus to the pigs had never gone to a doctor so it had not been established whether or not they had the new flu strain.

The pig farm, which is located in Buenos Aires province, was put under quarantine and the spokesman said H1N1 flu tests had proved negative since 24 June.

Argentines are increasingly worried about the new flu virus as peak flu season approaches in the Southern Hemisphere winter. The Health Ministry has confirmed 1,587 cases and 26 deaths, prompting officials to bring forward school holidays.

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Imported Pigs Crowd Out Local Pork
RUSSIA - The country's pork producers are facing a growing challenge from importers of live pigs who are using a loophole in customs regulations to avoid quotas and higher tariffs.



In May alone, 110,000 live pigs were brought into Russia for slaughter, Mikhail Popov, general director of the Ostankino Meat processing plant, said Tuesday at a meeting of the National Pork Producer's Union.

About 8,250 tons of live pork is imported into the country every month, which comes out to almost 100,000 tons of pork annually, or 19 per cent of the 2009 pork import quota of 531,000 tons, Mr Popov said.

While pork imports are normally subject to a 15 per cent duty, those in excess of the quota are subject to a tariff of 40 per cent to 75 per cent of their customs value.

Live pigs, however, are only subject to a 5 per cent import tax, Popov said.

Sales of all types of meat fell by 16.5 per cent to $933 million for the period between January and April, compared with the same period in 2008.

Importers first attempted to circumvent the quota with live pigs in 2004, when 55,000 pigs were brought into the country in the first eight months of the year, compared with only 25,000 in all of 2003.

Companies said at the time that importing a live pig from Poland and slaughtering it in Russia was 20 per cent cheaper than buying frozen Russian pork.

Meat producers did not see the imports as a threat, believing that the number of pigs brought into the country would be kept in check by a lack of modern slaughtering methods.

In the last three years, however, Russia's slaughterhouses have become 30 per cent more efficient, said Musheg Mamikonyan, president of the Meat Union.

By 2008, pork imports rose to 603,000 head of swine, and the first five months of this year have shown that this trend is continuing, said Alexander Nikitin, head of the Miratorg meat processing plant.

Up to 367,000 pigs have already been imported this year, Nikitin said, and the main company importing them, Agrogalimeks, was doing so in 2004 as well.

Agrogalimeks was not available for comment, reports The Moscow Times.com.

The difference in price between domestic and imported pigs has not changed, said Sergei Yushin, head of the National Meat Association.

The average cost of a live Russian pig is 1.70 euros ($2.40) per kilogram, compared with up to 1.4 euros per kilogram -- including transportation -- for imported pigs.

Nikitin said pork producers have already tried to convince the government to "plug the hole," without success. "The government alluded to WTO talks," he said.

In 2007, then-Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev, now governor of the Voronezh region, proposed raising the tariff on live pigs up to 35 per cent, but a final decision on the matter was never made.

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China to Use Harvard Gene Pigs for Transplant Test
CHINA - A Chinese hospital in southwestern Sichuan Province will import four genetically-engineered pigs from Harvard University to carry out pig-to-monkey organ transplant experiments, a doctor said Friday.



Under the agreement signed by the Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital and Harvard University on Wednesday, the four pigs would arrive in China within three to six months, said Yang Hongji, director of the hospital's Clinical Organ Transplantation Center.

As a platform for cooperation, the two sides had jointly established a lab for xenotransplantation studies at the hospital, Mr Yang said.

Xenotransplantation is a surgical procedure in which tissue or whole organs are transferred from one species to another. Harvard University was one of the earliest institutions in the world to conduct such studies.

"We will mainly carry out three clinical pig-to-monkey xenotransplantation experiments after we import the pigs," Mr Yang said.

He said the experiments would include transplants of pig's liver, pancreas and kidney to a monkey and related studies, such as how to cultivate livers and kidneys that can be used for human organ transplants, he said.

In addition to organ transplants, medical and science workers at the lab plan to use the four pigs to do other research, including how to apply pig's tissues, such as skin, bone and vein, to cosmetic surgeries and treatment of injuries.

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Mexican Pork Export Drops Due to A/H1N1 Flu
MEXICO - Mexico's pork export dropped 90 per cent, or by around 30,000 tons, due to the spread of the A/H1N1 flu, according to a report on Monday.



Since the World Trade Organization (WTO) declared the A/H1N1 flu outbreak in Mexico a "public health emergency of international concern," 20 nations have imposed import controls on Mexican meat, said a report from the Public Finance Study Center.

Despite the impact on the export of pork, the poultry industry has not been affected, it added.

Mexico's pork export totals some 22 million US dollars each month with some 3.9 million dollars' worth going to Japan, the largest single export market.

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Import of Pork Likely if Price Goes Up
MALAYSIA - The Veterinary Services Department will allow pork to be imported if the farm price of pigs continues to go up, director-general Datuk Dr Abd Aziz Jamaluddin said.



He said the interest of consumers ought to be protected and as such the department would have no choice but to bring in more pork from elsewhere.

According to The Star, Dr Abd Aziz said that from last August till Monday, the department paid RM6.7mil in production incentives to pig farmers.

"The incentives have been given to 657 farmers throughout the country and it accounted for 5.8 per cent of the total amount given to all farmers under the National Food Security policy," he said at a press conference here, yesterday. "However, farmers still continue to raise prices."

The Government was concerned as an uncontrollable hike would change the buying trend of consumers, he said.

"Consumers might choose chicken or other meat and this will indirectly affect the prices of other commodities," he added.

The farm price of pigs now is about RM7 per kg, up from about RM5.50 earlier this year.

Pig farmers and pork sellers have been at loggerheads for the past months over the farm price of pigs.

Pork sellers claim the farmers have been raising prices, causing the market to be depressed while the farmers say they have had to raise prices because of low profits and risks in the industry.

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Fewer Pigs Paying Off for Qld Pork Producers
AUSTRALIA - A strategic move to reduce pork production has paid off for Queensland pig producers.



The Australian Bureau of Statistics, ABC reports that since May last year, pig meat production dropped nine per cent to just 27,000 tonnes.

Australian Pork Limited delegate Paul Taylor says the deficit has saved the industry.

"Because, nationally, there was a nine per cent reduction in the sow numbers obviously the supply and demand equation became much more in our favour and because of that we've been receiving exceptionally good prices from about September/October last year," he says.