September 25, 2007

 

China denies blue-ear disease cover-up

 

 

China has denied a cover-up of pig disease that has killed tens of thousands of pigs in the country and insisted that outbreaks in Vietnam and Myanmar did not come from the country.

 

Li Jinxiang, deputy director of the Agriculture Ministry's Veterinary Bureau, said the Chinese government has strict regulations on reporting the epidemics and provides timely disclosure on the outbreaks.

 

Vice Minister Gao Hongbin told reporters that the latest official number of pigs that had been infected with blue-ear pig disease had risen to around 290,000. This compares with 257,000 as of late August. Some 68,000 of those affected pigs died.

 

However, the Western media were quoted to have expressed doubts about China's official figures, suspecting the government was trying to keep a lid on a more serious crisis.

 

Li said China had been reporting outbreaks of the disease and had provided sequencing data of the virus to the World Organisation for Animal Health and the Food and Agriculture Organisation since epidemics were found last year.

 

He rejected Western media reports that China had refused to share virus samples with international organisations and other countries, arguing it had never received requests from them.

 

Li said the Ministry of Agriculture, to date, has not received any request from any international organisations and other countries' laboratories for samples and viruses.

 

Li also denied that a similar virus detected in neighbouring Vietnam and Myanmar had come from China, instead arguing that the blue-ear disease found in China displays similarity with the virus that originated from the United States in the 1980s.

 

Last month, China's chief vet Jia Youling said some local authorities may have covered up the outbreaks but the problem was not as bad as reported by some media.

 

Jia said then more than 100 million of the country's 500 million pigs had been inoculated with an effective vaccine, which had been distributed to the regions most seriously hit.

 

He said the spread of the disease was now under "preliminary control."

 

The highly pathogenic blue-ear pig disease, or Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome, first reported in the United States in 1987, is characterised by reproductive failure, death in young pigs and mild respiratory disease in pigs of all ages.

 

The spread of the disease has emerged as a major health concern for China and has been blamed for contributing to a sharp spike in prices of pork, a staple of the Chinese diet.