The swine fever of others: Puerto Rico is over 2,000 kilometers from the famous farms of Iowa, the kingdom of the American Pork. Yet, as Bloomberg reported in recent days, the disease is now scary in the United States, where there hasn't been an outbreak for over 40 years. To give an idea of what it means, just know that the United States is the largest pork producer in the world after China. The hot dog and sausage industry has a turnover of $ 7.7 billion. This makes it understandable that you don't want the virus to come ashore. At the end of July
the infection was documented on farms in the Dominican Republic in September in poor Haiti, the latest in a series of biblical calamities that hit the poorest country in the world.
The ill-concealed fear, that of an export ban throughout the United States, is a fear that all pork producers in Sardinia know well where, although the slaughter of wild pigs has resumed after two years, the epidemic seems to have disappeared.
If the PSA could bring a humanitarian catastrophe to the United States in the neighboring Caribbean republics, it would create a certain economic catastrophe. In Sardinia we know what PSA is, a haemorrhagic disease that leads to the death of infected animals in about ten days. There are no solutions other than the massive killing of the garments.
Liz Wagstrom, chief veterinarian of the National Pork Producers Council, a group representing 60,000 US pig farmers, spoke to Bloomberg. "This is probably the most feared pig disease."
The Dominican Republic has already culled more than 65,700 pigs this year in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 1970s epidemic (all livestock, more than 1.4 million animals were exterminated).
Fear is contagious. This could be the most serious animal health crisis of our generation, ”said Gregorio Torres, head of the science department of the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health. No ribs come from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to the United States. The reason is linked to the fact that the two nations, in order not to miss anything, also have the classic swine fever, less deadly, but always present.
