Shanghai: Disease found in dead pig in river

Since we first reported on this yesterday the number of dead pigs has gone up from 90 to 1000. Pestilence anyone?

Thousands of dead pigs found floating in Chinese river

Shanghai authorities say tap water is safe to drink as efforts stepped up to remove bloated carcasses from Huangpu river

the Guardian,

11 March, 2013

More than 2,800 pig carcasses have been discovered floating in a river that runs through Shanghai and feeds into its tap water supply, according to China's state media.

The number of dead pigs found in the Huangpu river rose from a few dozen on Thursday to more than 1,200 on Sunday, and again to over 2,813 on Monday afternoon as the city's cleanup effort intensified.

While the cause of the incident is still under investigation, water quality tests along the river have identified traces of porcine circovirus, a virus that can affect pigs but not humans. No signs of other diseases such as E coli, foot and mouth disease, or hog cholera have been found, and authorities say the city's tap water is still safe to drink.

Pollution has emerged as a source of widespread anger in China. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters

China's toxic smog, rubbish-strewn rivers and contaminated soil have emerged as a source of widespread anger over the past few weeks, as profit-minded officials jostle with aggrieved internet users over how to balance the country's economic development with its environmental concerns.

Experts say the groundwater in half of all Chinese cities is contaminated, most of it severely, and that soil pollution could be widespread in 15 of the country's 33 provinces.

Villagers found the first pig carcasses near a water treatment plant on a creek upstream from Shanghai on Tuesday, but clean-up efforts did not begin until the weekend, according to the news portal Xinmin Online. Shanghai initially dispatched six barges to remove the corpses, and added another six when the problem's scope became clear.

Dead pigs collected by sanitation workers from Shanghai's main waterway. Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

Pictures online show the bloated carcasses floating by the shore of the murky river and workers wearing blue uniforms fishing them out with long-handled farming tools. "The overpowering stench of the pigs from strong sun exposure and heat in Shanghai these days has made most reporters on the scene sick," reported the popular China news blog Ministry of Tofu.

Xu Rong, director of Shanghai's Songjiang district environmental department, told China's state broadcaster CCTV that she saw dead pigs floating along an 11km stretch of the river's Pingshen waterway, which extends to a cement plant in nearby Zhejiang province.

Judging by identification tags on the the pigs' ears, she said, they most likely floated into Shanghai from farming communities upstream.

"You can see dead pigs here every year, but there are more now than in the past few years," a local man told the station.

The Jiaxing Daily newspaper in northern Zhejiang province quoted a villager as saying that over the past two months almost 20,000 pigs in his village have died of unknown causes. While Shanghai compensates its farmers for properly disposing of dead swine, the newspaper said, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces lack a comparable incentive system, so farmers there often dump their pig carcasses directly into local rivers.

"The local authorities are conducting co-ordinated efforts to stop the dumping of dead pigs from the source," said China's official newswire Xinhua.

Disease found in dead pig from river

Authorities have detected a sometimes-fatal disease in at least one of the pig carcasses fished out of the Huangpu River in Shanghai's Songjiang District since last week.

Shanghai Daily

12 March, 2013

The disease is associated with the porcine circovirus, which is widespread in pigs but doesn't affect other livestock or humans, officials said yesterday.

The dead pigs were mainly from Jiaxing in neighboring Zhejiang Province, the Shanghai government said yesterday.

By Sunday evening, more than 2,800 pigs had been removed from the river in Songjiang and Jinshan districts, authorities said.

Shao Qiliang, secretary general of the Shanghai Agricultural Commission, said the pigs had been dumped in the Huangpu River from family farms Jiaxing and drifted downstream.

The total number of carcasses is expected to increase. Workers were continuing to collect dead pigs from the river and the government was closely monitoring water quality, although no pollution has been found so far.

Shao said the commission had informed agricultural authorities in Zhejiang Province, who have started intercepting and retrieving dead pigs in their area.

Pigs that have died of disease should be either incinerated or buried, but some unscrupulous farmers and animal control officials have sold problematic carcasses to slaughterhouses, with the pork ending up in markets.

As a food safety problem, this has drawn attention from the Ministry of Public Security, which has made it a priority to crack down on gangs that purchase dead or sick pigs and process them for profit.

Zhejiang police said officers have been investigating the trade in pork from sick pigs and their efforts were stepped up ahead of the lunar New Year celebrations last month.

In one operation last year in a village in Jiaxing, police arrested 12 suspects and confiscated nearly 12 tons of tainted pork meat.

Shao said: "We retrieve dead pigs from Jiaxing almost every year. There were around 200 a year in the past, but the number is particularly high this year."

An unnamed villager told the Jiaxing Daily newspaper: "Ever since the police stepped up efforts to crack down on the illicit market of sick pigs since last year, no one has come here to buy dead pigs, and the problem of pig dumping is worse than ever this year."

Shanghai collects dead pigs from farmers for biological treatment and farmers can receive some compensation for their losses.

There is no such mechanism in Zhejiang and pig farmers there simply discard dead pigs in rivers, according to the newspaper.

Wang Xianjun, a government worker in Zhulin village, told the newspaper that villagers were breeding too many pigs.

Wang said the village had 10,078 dead pigs in January and another 8,325 last month. "We have limited land in the village," he said. "We do not have that much land for burial."

Some of the dead pigs in the current case will be sent to an incinerator in Shanghai's Fengxian District while the others will be buried, Shao said.

Shanghai resident Huang Beibei was first to expose the problem when he posted photos online last Thursday.

This story from neighbouring Korea from late 2011 indicates what could be at stake in the case of the dead pigs in Shanghai.

South Korea Reportedly Buries 1.4 Million Pigs Alive To Combat Foot And Mouth Disease

Shanghai Daily

1 November, 2011

South Korea's decision to bury 1.4 million pigs alive in an effort to curb the spread of the highly contagious foot and mouth disease (FMD) has sparked the ire of international animal activists.

According to reports, the first case of FMD -- which affects all cloven hoofed animals including pigs, goats and cattle -- was confirmed in November in Andong city of North Gyeongsang province, and has since spread quickly. Officials began embarking on a mass cull of roughly 12 percent of its swine population to combat the disease, primarily because it affects the nation's ability to export meat, Food Safety News is reporting.

As part of the process, officials are said to be piling the pigs on top of each other in large trucks, dumping thousands of them into mass graves, and burying them alive.

"The outbreak is the most serious in Korea's history," Kim Jae-hong, a veterinary science professor at Seoul National University, is quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying. "It is hard to predict when we can contain the spread of the disease, but the most important thing right now is to control movement in and out of the farmhouses that are affected, and thoroughly disinfect the cars around the area."

Groups such as PETA have started online campaigns, arguing for the animals to be vaccinated rather than killed. Though Reuters reports that 1.2 million pigs have since been vaccinated, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says treatments must be matched to the specific type and subtype of the virus before it can be effective.