IKAR in Mass and Industry Media

Swine Fever's Spread Threatens EU, According to Russian Watchdog

Bloomberg

Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The spread of African swine fever among wild boars in Russia poses a threat to Ukraine, Belarus and the European Union and may affect transportation of some grains, Russia's food-safety watchdog said.

Infected wildlife may spread the disease through neighboring countries as far as the EU, Rosselkhoznadzor said in a statement on its website today. A quarantine zone set up last week may be expanded to include all of the southern Russian grain-growing region of Krasnodar, said Alexei Alekseenko, a spokesman for the service.

"Grain, including feed cereals, is still exported in a usual regime," he said by phone from Moscow. Still, there's a "real" possibility that a ban on transporting food may hamper some carriage of feed cereals in the region, Alekseenko said.

The fever is at risk of spreading further after private householders in Krasnodar concealed cases on their properties, aiding its transmission to wild hogs in the Astrakhan, Volgograd and Rostov regions, according to the statement. Krasnodar set up the quarantine on Aug. 16, closing roads to shipping of pork and some produce such as root vegetables.

"The situation is being studied thoroughly, and the governor will make additional decisions closer to the end of this week," Alekseenko said concerning the potential widening of the quarantine area. The list of products whose shipment is barred in the zone may be expanded this week, he said.

No Human Threat

The virus has no vaccine and is deadly for pigs, though it poses no threat to humans, according to the United Nations' Food & Agriculture Organization. It has affected 308 Russian areas in 27 regions since 2007 and caused more than 540,000 hogs to be slaughtered, according to Rosselkhoznadzor data.

Krasnodar is Russia's main grain-growing region and accounted for 12 percent of last year's national crop with a harvest of 11.4 million metric tons, according to government statistics. It's also the principal route for transporting Russian grain to be shipped from ports on the Black Sea.

Russia typically exports 4 million to 5 million tons of feed grains a year, according to an estimate by the Moscow-based Institute for Agricultural Market Studies.

The latest fever outbreak necessitated the slaughter of 7,546 pigs on a farm in Krasnodar's Bryukhovetsky district, Rosselkhoznadzor said. The illness also was detected on Aug. 17 for the first time in the Yaroslavl region, adjacent to Moscow on the east, among 10 hogs kept by a private householder in the village of Solotskovo, data from the service showed.

20.08.12

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