African swine fever is a highly contagious hemorrhagic disease that is often fatal in domestic pigs and wild boars.

There are no risks to human health. Given the financial implications and limitations in trade, eradication of ASF is the ultimate goal.

In partnership with the University of Minnesota Swine Group and the Swine Health Information Center, the U-M’s College of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animal Health and Food Safety are collaborating on a project to strengthen the U.S. market against global swine diseases. The Swine Disease Global Surveillance Project compiles data from organizations, governments, producers and experts around the world to provide near real-time global surveillance of swine diseases.

In a recent U-M online report, Maria Sol Perez, research development manager at the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety, provided answers to questions about what ASF is, where global outbreaks of ASF could occur and how the Swine Disease Global Surveillance Project identifies and tracks hazards that could put the U.S. swine industry at risk. Some of those questions and answers follow.

What is ASF and how is it transmitted and diagnosed?
ASF is one of the most severe hemorrhagic diseases in pigs. It is caused by a virus and is often fatal, having a drastic impact on the pig industry. Because of this, ASF is listed as a notifiable disease by the World Organization for Animal Health, which means that all member countries must immediately report any outbreak of the disease in their territory. The USDA considers ASF a foreign animal disease and, therefore, swine byproduct imports from ASF-positive countries are forbidden.

Infected wild boars and pigs are the main source of the ASF virus in infected countries. The transmission can occur by direct contact between infected and uninfected pigs, or indirectly, by contaminated swill feeding (uncooked pork products) or any objects or materials which are likely to carry infection, such as contaminated clothes, utensils or trucks.

Unfortunately, ASF presents a huge diversity of clinical signs. Early signs you may notice include: increase in the number of animals with purple ears and other parts of the body, fever, diarrhea and sudden increase of diseased animals and mortality. It is very important to highlight that ASF can have a much milder presentation in the field than what it is traditionally expected, misleading the early clinical diagnostic. ASF should be considered if any of the clinical signs described are found in combination with mild to severe increase in mortality.

Where are outbreaks of ASF currently reported and is there a threat of a possible outbreak in the United States?
Since 2007, ASF has spread from the Caucasus region to eastern European Union countries. It then continued to spread westward affecting domestic pig and wild boar populations, making a long jump last September, reaching Belgium. Simultaneously, last August, it had its first incursion into Asia, where China, a major pork producer worldwide, reported its first outbreak. Since then it has expanded rapidly through China, reaching 31 out of 34 provincial-level administrative units.

Since the first outbreak in China, many countries in the region were alerted and raised their control protocols in points of entry, considering that expansion regionally would be almost impossible to avoid. Confirming these concerns, last January, the first outbreak in a neighboring country was reported in Mongolia, and then in Vietnam and Cambodia.

How does the Swine Disease Global Surveillance Project gather data on the global occurrence of ASF? How frequently is the data reported?
The Swine Disease Global Surveillance Project (SDGS) compiles data from organizations, governments, producers and experts around the world to provide near real-time global surveillance of swine diseases. SDGS’s international network of collaborators allows the team to accurately interpret and contextualize that information.

We routinely do online searches, contact official agencies worldwide, and work with our international network of collaborators to collect and organize a combination of soft and official data. Then there are successive screening steps in which data and information is modified, edited, corrected, and expanded in collaboration with USDA/Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Center for Epidemiology and Animal Health and selected stakeholders. Finally, a report describing the outputs are made available monthly within the Swine Health Information Center report to the industry and to the public on a routine basis.

Currently, the report primarily tracks three tier-one reportable foreign animal diseases in swine: ASF, classical swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease. We also include comments regarding other diseases that have a great impact on the industry when appropriate, based on the epidemiological context of the event.

Since the first report in November 2017, the project has published 24 reports that identify and track hazards that could put the U.S. swine industry at risk. After the first outbreak of ASF was detected in China in August 2018, the program increased the report output to bi-monthly—rather than monthly—reports to ensure the swine industry had the most up-to-date information.

Where is the data available and what are examples of how the data could be used?
Swine disease data is available almost everywhere. The main challenge is building the proper steps of screening and filtering that will give consistency to the whole project. Currently, multiple official data sources such as government and international organization websites, international cooperation programs, and soft data sources like newspapers and unstructured electronic information are systematically screened to build a raw repository. After that, an include/exclude process is undertaken. As an output of this phase, a clean list of events is obtained, which will be scored using a multi-criteria rubric that was built based on credibility, and factors such as, scale and speed of the outbreak; connectedness; local capacity to respond; and potential financial impact on the U.S. market.

These reports have the goal to be an accessible tool for the industry to understand complex epidemiological contexts.

Along with Swine Disease Global Surveillance Project, what are other ways you are preparing for and protecting against global swine disease?
The Center for Animal Health and Food Safety is one of five collaborating centers focused on veterinary service capacity building. As such, CAHFS has the mandate to improve the capacity of the official veterinary services and veterinarians in the field at national and international level, to improve the early detection, management and eradication efforts for diseases like ASF.

Diseases that impact trade do not respect borders and have the potential to spread quickly around the world, which creates a need to tackle these challenges as a global community.

This is why CAHFS and the Swine Disease Surveillance Project relies heavily on a global network of experts to continue to improve global health and protect against global animal diseases. While external partners allow CAHFS to accomplish more effective and efficient work, the University of Minnesota’s ingrained expertise in swine health also makes CAHFS the ideal center of the program’s research.

Learn more about the project online.

Source: University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine, which is solely responsible for the information provided and is wholly owned by the source. Informa Business Media and all its subsidiaries are not responsible for any of the content contained in this information asset.