"African Swine Fever is a man-made disease".

"African Swine Fever is a man-made disease".If there is one take-home message to report after having spoken to two of the leading scientists on African Swine Fever, it should be that the major threat with regard to the virus is not the virus itself, but how humans deal with it.

 Dr Klaus Depner, head of the International Animal Health Team at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) on the island Riems in northern Germany, has to admit that even he as expert needed some time to understand the disease. How does the virus spread?Wild boars shed the virus mainly when they are very sick and in the final stage of the disease.

When the animals have high fever it’s in their character to stay where they are, and they are certainly not going to walk very far when they feel bad. So what we have here is a virus that is very stable in its environment without fast movement. It neither dies out, nor moves. Undisposed carcasses of infected wild boars remain infectious for a long time in the environment and become a source of infection for healthy animals.


 The human role Still, ASF did spread from the Caucasus until the Baltics and Poland. The question now is how. Soft ticks and insects are unlikely to have transmitted the virus, the scientists say. In fact, they have little doubt identifying about the real reason behind most of the ASF outbreaks: negligence.
Participating in recent ASF monitoring missions in Eastern Europe, Depner has a good idea of what has likely occurred. He says, “Often it was a matter of human misbehaviour. What happened is that infected meat made it to the market.


When many pigs started to die, they were sent to slaughter. Pig prices dropped, cheap meat entered the market and the meat made its way into homes – and into suitcases. This is how the virus dispersed. The virus spread along the main roads, the transport routes. This spread bears a 100% human mark.” more.