The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture announced today, Tuesday (2), the death of seven wild pigs as a result of an outbreak of African swine fever discovered near Barcelona, bringing the number of cases recorded since last week to nine, with two cases reported.
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The Ministry explained in a statement, “The Central Veterinary Laboratory in Algete (Madrid) confirmed the positivity (result) for the African swine fever virus in seven other wild boars that were found dead in the same municipality of Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Valles, and very close to the place where the other two appeared last week.”
“With these new positive results, the presence of the disease has been confirmed in a total of nine wild animals, all in the same area,” the text noted, referring to this forested area in the Barcelona metropolitan area.
The ministry added that the virus was not detected on any of the pig farms located within a distance of 20 kilometers around the affected area.
The memorandum added that the European Commission’s Veterinary Emergency Team, made up of epidemiologists, joined the work on Tuesday to “evaluate the measures applied on the ground and issue recommendations to strengthen the measures.”
In addition to the local agents already mobilized, the Spanish government deployed, on Monday, one hundred soldiers of the Spanish Military Emergency Unit, equipped with drones and decontamination stations or capture management stations under biosafety conditions.
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One hypothesis that experts have evaluated is that the virus may have arrived via contaminated sausages that were transported by road and later consumed by wild boar, but this has not yet been confirmed.
A potential surge in African swine fever – a disease that does not affect humans, but is highly contagious and fatal in pigs – would be fatal for the sector in Spain, the world’s third-largest producer of this meat and its derivatives.
The country exports 2.77 million tons annually to more than a hundred countries, and is now focusing its energy so that the virus does not reach Catalan farms.
The region is responsible for exports worth around 3 billion euros a year (R$18.7 billion), including 1 billion euros (R$6.2 billion) to countries outside the European Union, according to the regional government.
On Monday evening, Spanish Agriculture Minister Luis Planas celebrated China’s agreement to “regionalize” the import of Spanish pork, that is, banning purchases from the Barcelona province, while keeping purchases from other regions of the country open.
In Europe, African swine fever is currently present in the Baltic states and several Eastern European territories, since arriving via Russia in 2014.