China is experiencing a disease epidemic. No one knows how the disease spreads. This is far beyond the comprehension of any surveillance scientist. It spreads quickly, killing large numbers, freezing trade and transport, and causing massive economic disruption. It travels around the globe, hitchhiking on global travel. There is no cure and no vaccine. It will arrive in the Americas in July 2021.
It's 2021. This year is not a typo. This is not a Covid outbreak. It is a parallel, hidden epidemic, a deadly animal illness called African swine flu that was discovered in the Dominican Republic in July. Although it poses no threat to humans, African swine flu is extremely destructive to livestock.
Animal health authorities in the United States are on alert. The US Department of Agriculture pledged a $500 million emergency appropriation to increase surveillance and prevent the disease from reaching other countries. Internationally, African swine flu is so fearful that if it was found in the US, then pork exports worth more than $7 billion per year would be immediately stopped.
The worst-case scenario is long-distance transboundary spreading of highly contagious, pathogenic diseases. This is what Michael Ward, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, said to WIRED by email. It is the agricultural equivalent of Covid-19.
There is no cure for the Covid pandemic. But, just as there was with Covid at its beginning, there are hints of hope. Basic science has been developing new findings for years, but they have not received much attention. A multinational team of scientists from the USDAs Agricultural Research Service announced two weeks ago that they had developed a vaccine candidate based on a weaker version of the virus. The key gene was deleted. It was tested in a field trial in Vietnam with pigs.
A commercial partner, Navetco (Vietnamese company), is developing the vaccine candidate. The timeline is not yet clear. This is the fifth experimental vaccine that the USDA team has developed. The first four vaccines were developed by private companies, without federal funding. Douglas Gladue, a microbiologist and one of the developers, stated that we currently have the most advanced African Swine Fever vaccine available.
Let's take a step back: African swine flu is an agricultural problem that has been around for a while. Despite the fact that it decimated China's pork industry and left behind a trail of destruction, China is not the disease's source. African swine flu actually began in Africa almost 100 years ago.
Robert Eustace Montgomery, a Scottish veterinarian, was the first to describe it. He was working for the British colonial government of East Africa. Montgomery wrote that he witnessed outbreaks of hemorhagic disease in farm pigs. It was so severe that the owner had to be ready for a complete loss.
A virus caused the new disease to become a common companion for farming in East Africa. It is carried by wild swine, warthogs and other animals and spreads to livestock. The symptoms of the disease were constant: Pigs would get fevers, lose their appetites and develop bleeding in their internal organs and under their skin. Finally, they would collapse. An outbreak would either kill all the pigs in a herd or cause a famine. Farmers had to slaughter their pigs to quell it. Farmers who first observed the disease discovered that it was impossible to stop it by keeping pigs in a confined environment instead of allowing them to roam freely and by building strong fences to keep wild swine away.
