ASF Identified in in Wild Boar in Greece

The identification of African Swine Fever in wild boar in Greece highlights the Swine Health Information Center's monthly global swine disease surveillance report.

The Swine Health Information Center's global swine disease surveillance report, released as part of its February enewsletter, details the identification of two dead African Swine Fever infected wild boar in Greece, the first report of ASF in Greece since 2020.

Dr. Paul Sundberg, the Executive Director of the Swine Health Information Center and a member of the Swine Innovation Porc Coordinated African Swine Fever Research Working Group, says as best we can determine North America has about the same density of wild boar as there is in Europe.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:

Our issue is learning those lessons of how they were able to control it. One of the things for example is in Luxembourg. In Luxembourg there was an infection in wild boar.
They successfully were able to isolate the wild boar in the area and work their way in and eradicate those wild boar in the area of infection and successfully remove ASF from their population of wild boar.

USDA Wildlife Services has been working very hard on plans to implement the same type of situation in North America, in the U.S. if that would happen here.
The plan is to try to ring the infection and work your way in from the outside, meeting in the middle and eradicating all the boar as you go in.That has been successful in some places in Europe and we're hopeful that that would be a successful plan.

One of the things that our industry is doing in the U.S. is working with Wildlife Services trying to encourage them to do field trials of the plan so we can see exactly how it could work and how successful it could be in elimination.

Dr. Sundberg says there is room for cautious optimism but, given the European experience, we know that if ASF gets into the feral pig population in North American it may be extremely difficult to take out.