ASF-Free Regions Working Cooperatively to Minimise Risk of Incursion

The Swine Health Information Center reports regions not infected with African Swine Fever are working cooperatively to minimize the threat of incursion.The Swine Health Information Center's monthly global swine disease monitoring report, released as part of its January eNewsletter indicates African Swine Fever remains prevalent in Poland with 44 outbreaks in 2024 and ASF has been confirmed in Siri Lanka with 135 outbreaks since the initial outbreak in October. SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says continued vigilance is needed because African Swine Fever is not abating.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:

A lot of countries that had some degree of a break, like Germany, are still seeing spread across the land as well as in Poland and Italy. These shifting patterns do highlight the fact that ASF management and control is a very complex topic and I think it also highlights the fact that, when managing ASF, you can never let your guard down as far as identifying and mitigating different risk factors that go into virus spread.

When you look at places such as the United States, we still focus on how do we prevent the entry of the virus into our country and we can do that from a variety of methods, whether that's utilization of beagles at the border to try to identify and prevent entry of illegal pork products but also looking at what are other countries doing for effective biosecurity and bioexclusion within their country.

Is that a different transportation and sanitation structure, is it the use of vaccinations and then also evaluating how are other countries managing their wild boar populations? As we look at U.S. preparedness, a lot of these different regions, not only in the U.S. but in Canada and Mexico are really getting together to assess how we manage a lot of these different risks currently and then identify are there other more specific areas of focus that are needed or research to understand our populations in the U.S. and how they could potentially be affected by incursion of African Swine Fever.

SHIC's swine disease monitoring reports can be accessed at swinehealth.org.