Farmer Gao Yongfei is paying real close attention to more than 5000 pigs of his than he has ever done before.
That is primarily because of the fact that at nearby farms, hundreds of pigs are losing their loves from quite a mysterious virus and so, Gao along with his staff are now quite vigilant in checking their herd for possible symptoms of African swine fever.
The 64-year-old farmer, Gao Yongfei, who owns the Yongfei Livestock Farm said that he can easily understand whether a pig is sick when its mouth turns dark and tends to act in a real crazy manner. So, once a pig with fever gets identified, it needs to be slaughtered immediately.
Yongfei Livestock Farm located in Yue Qing is basically a city lying in China’s south-eastern province of Zhejiang, which happens to be the third region in China where authorities went on to report that there was an outbreak of African swine fever in the middle of August. Since that time, there have been further seven outbreaks, occurring in every few days, each of them being hundreds of miles apart from one another. In little over a month, around 897 pigs have lost their lives and almost 20000 have been slaughtered to try and prevent the spread of the virus.
Gao said that this dangerous getting spread rapidly has made everyone really worried.
There is a worry among the Scientists as well. A professor of veterinary medicine at Kansas State University, Jürgen Richt, who is an expert on African Swine Fever, says that though the virus does not cause any adverse effect on the humans, it has definitely shown a tendency to kill herds of pigs quite quickly. The virus is contagious in nature and pigs that are infected die within five to 10 days.
Richt talks about the fact that there is another challenge, which is basically about the virus that can also be carried by wild boars and ticks living in China. Scientists feel that the spread of virus far and wide in such QuickTime is only because Pigs are getting shipped across China by farmers and buyers.
