A U.S. Department of Agriculture grant will enable the U.S. pork sector to establish a dialogue in Asia aimed at building strategic partnerships to address African Swine Fever.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Animal Service division has allocated approximately 1.7 million dollars to start a dialogue between the United States and Vietnam to share veterinary knowledge and ways to prevent African Swine Fever from further spreading.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says the effort will move ahead as fast as possible.
With all of the questions about African Swine Fever circulating around the world, not being in the U.S., not being in Canada, there are a lot of issues with the virus, its epidemiology, how it acts in pigs, even the diagnostics, that you can necessarily answer by a group of five pigs or 20 pigs in an experimental pen.
This is an opportunity to go where the virus is circulating and study how it acts in actual production, in pig populations rather than in small groups. That was the genesis, to try to learn the lessons of African Swine Fever where it’s circulating rather than trying to only research it here in the U.S. and that’s the value of this.
The other value of the project is going to be to help the Vietnamese producers and the government to learn some lessons about African Swine Fever over there as well to help understand better pathways of entry for example, ways to control it, ways to clean and disinfect and repopulate. Those are all questions that are common to pork production whether you’re in Canada or whether you’re in the U.S.
~ Dr. Paul Sundberg, Swine Health Information Center
Dr. Sundberg says this is an urgent matter and, as part of the grant process, the Swine Health Information Center is committed to providing reports to USDA on the progress and those reports will be communicated pork producers veterinarians and to the U.S. and Canadian industries.
