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Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Has African swine fever reached Germany after all, after the infection seems to have moved away from the border? Tonight a suspected Brandenburg boar carcass will be examined in the laboratory. The result should be available tomorrow.
In Germany there is an official suspected case of African swine fever: it was found on a wild boar carcass in Brandenburg, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture announced in Berlin that night. The body was found a few kilometers from the German-Polish border in the Spree-Neisse district.
According to the information, a sample of the carcass was already on its way to the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, the national reference laboratory. There it should be virologically examined. The responsible minister, Julia Klöckner, will report on the result on Thursday.
Swine fever is harmless to humans. For domestic pigs and wild boars, however, it is fatal. In Poland, from whose border the now found body was only a few kilometers away, cases of African swine fever have been recorded for some time.
The economic impact would be enormous
Statistics from the Polish Veterinary Service showed at the end of August that a total of 37 dead wild boars had been infected with swine fever in the western Polish Voivodeship of Lubusz since the beginning of August. The two westernmost sites were near the Dabie site, almost 40 kilometers from the German border near Guben in Brandenburg. All other sites were further east, between 50 and 100 kilometers from the German border.
Due to the falls near the border in spring, Brandenburg and Saxony had erected protective fences to prevent infected wild boars from entering the Oder. The construction of a fence was also initially planned on the Polish side.
In recent years, African swine fever has continued to spread southwest into the wild boar population in Europe. For Germany there is a high import risk. The economic impact would be enormous in the event of an epidemic. Pork exports to non-EU countries, including China, would be stopped. According to the EU Commission, there were around 8,200 infected domestic and wild pigs in Europe as of early August.
