Spanish swine fever outbreak may be linked to food eaten by boar, say officials

Spanish authorities have deployed hundreds of police officers, wildlife rangers and military personnel in an effort to contain an outbreak of highly infectious African swine fever (ASF) outside Barcelona before it becomes a major threat to the country’s €8.8bn-a-year pork export industry.

Officials believe the virus, detected in the municipality of Bellaterra, may have begun to circulate after a wild boar ate contaminated food that had been brought in from outside Spain.

“The probability that the origin was cold meat, a sandwich or a contaminated product that arrived by road is high because a lot of hauliers pass through Bellaterra,” Catalonia’s agriculture minister, Òscar Ordeig, told local radio on Monday. “That hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s a hypothesis.”

A 4-mile (6km) exclusion zone was set up around Bellaterra after two dead boars tested positive last week for ASF – which was last recorded in Spain in 1994 – and specialists are studying a further eight potential cases.

Ordeig said 117 personnel form Spain’s military emergencies unit had been dispatched to the area and would be working to disinfect the affected zones and remove animals, while also using drones to monitor the situation.

The authorities have warned people that wild boar should not be fed and urged them to call the emergency services if they come across any dead boars.

Salvador Illa, the regional president of Catalonia, said his administration had acted swiftly and “with full transparency” to the threat posed by ASF.

“We’re working in coordination with the rest of the administrations with a clear objective: to stop the outbreak, to help and protect the sector, and to overcome this emergency,” he said. “I once again ask the public to follow all the recommendations of the Catalan government.”

Spain’s agriculture minister, Luis Planas, met representatives from the country’s pork sector on Monday afternoon and told them the government was “putting into effect all its mechanisms to contain” the outbreak and minimise its impact on exports.

Spain, which is the EU’s biggest pork producer, exported pig meat products worth €5.1bn (£4.5bn) to other EU countries last year, and almost €3.7bn of pork products to markets outside the bloc. Spain slaughtered 58 million pigs in 2021 – up 40% from a decade earlier.

Planas told producers that China – which accounts for almost 42% of Spain’s pork exports to third countries – had halted imports from the province of Barcelona but was still accepting meat from unaffected areas of Spain.

“It’s good news that China is only excluding products from Barcelona province,” the minister said on Monday night, adding that the Chinese market was worth €1.1bn to Spanish pork producers. Planas also said that two-thirds of Spain’s pork export certificates remained active, adding that his department was working to ensure that restrictions on the remaining third were lifted as quickly as possible.

Long endemic to Africa, ASF is harmless to humans but often fatal to pigs. In 2018, ASF turned up in China, which is home to around half of the world’s pigs. By 2019, there were concerns that as many as 100 million pigs had been lost. Two years later the virus was confirmed to be in Germany, home to one of the EU’s largest swine herds.

ASF can be transmitted through direct contact with infected animals and can also spread via insects such as ticks. Wild boar have also been identified by some national governments as possible culprits for the virus’s spread.

However, ASF can also survive for several months in processed meat – and several years in frozen carcasses – making meat products a particular concern for cross-border transmission.