May 9, 2007

 

China keeping mum about pig deaths in Guangdong

 

 

A mysterious epidemic is killing pigs in Guangdong province, but international and Hong Kong authorities said Monday that the Chinese government was providing little information about it.

 

Officials in Hong Kong, at the World Health Organization and at the Food and Agriculture Organization said Monday that they had been told almost nothing about the latest pig deaths.

 

The issue is of particular concern to the WHO as many of the diseases that affects pig can affect humans as well.

 

Meanwhile, Hong Kong media was rife with reports of pigs with bleeding lesions in Gaoyao and neighboring Yunfu, both in Guangdong Province. Gaoyao, where pig carcasses were reportedly floating down a river, is 140 miles northwest of Hong Kong.

 

Guangdong authorities said no live pigs were being shipped from the Yunfu and Gaoyao areas to Hong Kong.

 

Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper said that up to 80 percent of the pigs had died in the area and that peasants were engaged in panic selling of sick animals.

 

An official in Gaoyao, 140 miles northwest of Hong Kong, confirmed late Monday afternoon that pigs were dying there.

 

Medical experts in Hong Kong said that based on the reports so far, the disease did not bear any semblance to the usual symptoms of bird flu.

 

Meanwhile both authorities in China and Hong Kong are keeping mum about the melamine in wheat gluten issue that killed thousands of pets in the US.

 

Animal feed dealers in northeastern China said that the two main destinations for feed mixed with melamine had been the Yangtze Delta region near Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong.