\n<\/p>\n
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\u2019s \u20ac8.8bn-a-year pork export industry.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d Catalonia\u2019s agriculture minister, \u00d2scar Ordeig, told local radio on Monday. \u201cThat hasn\u2019t been confirmed, but it\u2019s a hypothesis.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 4-mile (6km) exclusion zone was set up around Bellaterra after two dead boars tested positive last week for ASF \u2013 which was last recorded in Spain in 1994 \u2013 and specialists are studying a further eight potential cases.<\/p>\n
Ordeig said 117 personnel from Spain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Salvador Illa, the regional president of Catalonia, said his administration had acted swiftly and \u201cwith full transparency\u201d to the threat posed by ASF.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d he said. \u201cI once again ask the public to follow all the recommendations of the Catalan government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spain\u2019s agriculture minister, Luis Planas, met representatives from the country\u2019s pork sector on Monday afternoon and told them the government was \u201cputting into effect all its mechanisms to contain\u201d the outbreak and minimise its impact on exports.<\/p>\n
Spain, which is the EU\u2019s biggest pork producer, exported pig meat products worth \u20ac5.1bn (\u00a34.5bn) to other EU countries last year, and almost \u20ac3.7bn of pork products to markets outside the bloc. Spain slaughtered 58 million pigs in 2021 \u2013 up 40% from a decade earlier.<\/p>\n
Planas told producers that China \u2013 which accounts for almost 42% of Spain\u2019s pork exports to third countries \u2013 had halted imports from the province of Barcelona but was still accepting meat from unaffected areas of Spain.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Headlines Europe<\/span><\/p>\n A digest of the morning’s main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s good news that China is only excluding products from Barcelona province,\u201d the minister said on Monday night, adding that the Chinese market was worth \u20ac1.1bn to Spanish pork producers. Planas also said that two-thirds of Spain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 about half of the world\u2019s 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\u2019s largest swine herds.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s spread.<\/p>\n However, ASF can also survive for several months in processed meat \u2013 and several years in frozen carcasses \u2013 making meat products a particular concern for cross-border transmission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s \u20ac8.8bn-a-year pork export industry. Officials believe the virus, detected in the municipality of Bellaterra, may have begun<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[20099,20098,2495,1725,154,2969,153,714,656,17585],"class_list":{"0":"post-35776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-boar","9":"tag-eaten","10":"tag-fever","11":"tag-food","12":"tag-linked","13":"tag-officials","14":"tag-outbreak","15":"tag-spain","16":"tag-spanish","17":"tag-swine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}