Webinar ‘African Swine Fever: Navigating the Uncertainty’
What is the current situation of ASF?
African Swine Fever (ASF) is one of the main concerns in the sector, so in this webinar, we update the situation of the disease in Europe and the rest of the world.
For this, we have the leading international expert on ASF:
✅ José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaíno (Professor of Animal Health at the UCM and head of the Vacdiva project)
And as hosts of the webinar:
✅ Miguel Ángel Higuera (Director of Anprogapor)
✅ Miguel Chico (CEO of The Farm Revolution)
Did you miss it? Here you can rewatch it and hear the experts’ opinions.
https://youtu.be/LpRCXfZGldI
Are things being done correctly in Europe?
We are witnessing the spread of ASF from Poland to Germany. The situation with wildlife remains complicated due to the high density of wild boars and their movements.
Belgium and the Czech Republic only suffered the disease in wild boars and managed to eradicate it from their countries. The work they have done to control the disease has been excellent.
Sardinia might follow the steps of the two previous countries; it is making a great effort, and for more than a year, no positive case has been found in the wildlife.
Through wildlife, the risk is significantly reduced across Europe, but the risk of entry through transport remains significant (contamination on wheels), and there is also the risk of entry through contaminated food from affected countries: either through workers we share with those countries or through Asian food they are exporting which might have some type of return, like a picnic with leftover infected food.
The Debate
If ASF were to reach the American continent, where is it most likely to enter?
Containers
A lot of material from China and Russia is arriving in Venezuela, it’s a significant risk path
The USA imports Chinese products, but the containers on cargo ships are not as controlled as those on cruise ships.
Back in the EU, the real problem is that a country can be closed down if a wild boar is infected. At that moment, the country is considered infected, not just the pigs, but the entire country.
Regionalization does not avoid this problem, which is why compartmentalization should be promoted, as long as it is done properly: a production system that is completely under the control of that production and isolated from the rest; all production phases are guaranteed, controlled, and wildlife will not affect them.
José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaíno also spoke to us about the evolution of the vaccine and his project Vacdiva, a vaccination model in wild boars and domestic pigs. Wildlife is the main problem for Europeans and Asians, as there is a larger population of wild boars in Asia than in Europe, but they have not yet realized the problem that this poses.
The vaccine being developed by the Vacdiva project will be a safe, effective, and live vaccine, a vaccination system applied to each of the existing epidemiological scenarios in the world.
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