Executive Director’s message: The coming storm (Nov 2018)

Iam sitting in my office in Perry, Iowa watching the news stories chronicling the advancing hurricane named Florence. If measured by the number of news correspondents giving reports from a North Carolina beach setting, then Florence must be a huge storm. By the time you read this, we will know just how big it was and how much damage actually occurred. It is awe-inspiring to consider this massive force of nature as it bears down on the east coast of the United States.

There is another force of nature approaching the United States and this one is not weather related. It is the disease known as African swine fever (ASF). As I write this, a case of ASF has just been confirmed in Belgium. It is the first case in Belgium since 1985. An alarming fact about this case is that it appears to be a long distance from other known infected countries. At this point in time there is little known about the mode of spread in this case, but long distances between cases can indicate a pandemic.

Other ASF-infected countries include Africa, China, several Eastern European countries, and Russia. I won’t bore you with too many of the details of this virus. Suffice it to say, it is a hardy and lethal agent when introduced into pigs. There is no vaccine currently available. In the United States, ASF is considered a foreign animal disease that will immediately halt movements of pigs as well as the export of pork. There is no other way to describe an ASF incursion into the United States than devastating. Besides the potential mass casualties of infected pigs, there will be wholesale depopulation of all pigs within a zone around infected farms.

The lessons learned in 2013 and 2014 with the spread of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) are still fresh. The initial arrival of PEDV occurred nearly simultaneously in multiple herds over a wide geographic area. Research since then has proven the hypothesis that PEDV can survive the trip in certain feedstuffs from the Far East to the heartland of the United States. I will leave it to you to connect the dots. That disease also demonstrated that the industry we have built to efficiently move pigs and inputs is also quite capable of rapidly disseminating highly infectious viral diseases. Market trucks, lairages, feed mills, and a plethora of fomites that came in contact with the virus were rapidly contaminated with PEDV.

In the news stories about Florence, you could see governmental agencies (eg, Federal Emergency Management Agency), non-governmental organizations (eg, Red Cross), and industries (eg, utilities) start marshaling and staging resources and personnel for the post-hurricane task of rescue and recovery. The scale of this planning and deployment was impressive and time will tell how effective it was. Likewise, an introduction of ASF into the United States will require a massive effort to bring all needed resources together to stop the spread of this disease.

One advantage we have with ASF over a hurricane is that there is, at least as of this writing, an opportunity for us to prevent ASF from entering the United States. Prevention should be on the mind of everyone within the swine industry. It can’t be a “wink and a nod” and then go on with business as usual. We all need to confront the reality of the ASF virus and its ability to survive in and on several contaminated fomites including meat products, feedstuffs, vehicles, and equipment.

The role of feed in viral spread can be debated but there is a strong case to be made that contaminated feed is a serious and real risk. The brutal fact is the US pork industry imports a substantial number and quantity of feed additives and ingredients from countries with ASF. This is a wide-open door for incursion unless the US Department of Agriculture, the US Food and Drug Administration, and the feed industry either prevent or mitigate ASF virus-contaminated feed from entering the United States.

Unfortunately, we don’t have ASF radar to inform us about the coming storm, so we are left to do the best we can with the resources and resolve we can muster. Pork producer organizations and the AASV are active in assessing the risks posed by ASF and either implementing the actions needed to thwart the entry of the virus or advocating for action by the appropriate governmental agencies. This also includes the funding of research to fill the gaps in knowledge. Swine veterinarians working on farms can play a vital and active role in identifying risks and improving biosecurity aimed at the exclusion of the virus in all possible fomites coming onto a farm.

Prevention of ASF from entering the United States is a daunting and difficult task but that fact can’t be allowed to develop into an excuse. George Washington Carver put it this way, “Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” After the storm passes, let’s be glad to have done our best to prevent ASF and not be the ones still making excuses.

Tom Burkgren, DVM
Executive Director