New swine fever outbreak reported at Latvian farm

Riga, Sep 2 African swine fever (ASF) has been detected at a large pig farm in Laubere parish, central Latvia, the country's veterinary authority said.

To contain the outbreak, more than 23,300 pigs at the Baltic Pork farm will be culled. A quarantine zone has been established, restricting the movement of pigs and pig products, and nearby farms are undergoing health and biosafety checks.

Baltic Pork representative Daiga Lubka said it is too early to estimate the overall impact and losses.

This is the eighth ASF outbreak among domestic pigs in Latvia this year. The disease, first detected in the country in 2014, mainly spreads among wild boars, Xinhua news agency reported.

ASF is a highly infectious and severe hemorrhagic disease of pigs that produces a wide range of clinical signs and lesions that can closely resemble those of classical swine fever. African swine fever virus (ASFV) has a case fatality rate of up to 100 per cent in domestic pigs and wild boars. The virus is endemic in many African countries, where it is maintained in the environment through a sylvatic cycle involving warthogs and Ornithodoros (soft) ticks. ASFV was transmitted from Africa to Georgia in 2007, and since then, to many countries across central and eastern Europe, Russia, Asia (including China, which produces more than half of the world's pork), and the Americas (Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

This outbreak has led to the death and slaughter of millions of pigs, posing a massive threat to the global pig industry. Vaccines with good safety and efficacy have been developed and are being licensed for use in some countries.

ASF was considered to be confined to sub-Saharan Africa until 1957, when an outbreak occurred in Portugal as a result of waste from airline flights being fed to pigs near Lisbon airport. Another introduction of ASF to Portugal was reported in 1960. ASF remained endemic on the Iberian Peninsula until the mid-1990s.

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