Spain to resume pork exports to China from ASF unaffected regions

Four hundred Catalan police and rural wardens were deployed to the area in northeastern Spain at the weekend, followed by 117 members of Spain’s military ‍emergency unit on December 1, who will use drones to locate and remove potential infected animals.

“Our objective is to limit the zone and avoid contagion to other regions,” Agriculture Minister Luis Planas told media.

Risk to Spain’s pork industry

ASF, while harmless to ​humans, spreads rapidly among pigs and wild boar, posing a significant economic risk to Spain, one of the world’s largest ‌pork exporters.

Officials suspect the virus may have spread after a wild boar ate contaminated food, possibly a sandwich brought from outside Spain.

“The most likely option … is that cold cuts, a sandwich, contaminated food, could end up in a bin … and then that a wild boar would have eaten it and become infected,” Catalonia’s Agriculture Minister Oscar Ordeig said.

The infected area is close to the AP-7 highway, a major transport route linking Spain and France. Eight more suspected cases were ⁠being investigated and more cases expected, regional authorities said.

As officials await final test ​results, Mr Ordeig later told a briefing it was likely that human activity brought the ​virus to Spain from other parts of Europe, since no infected boars had been found elsewhere in Catalonia or neighboring France.

A European Commission spokesperson said it would not comment on the source of the outbreak until results of sequencing tests were ‍known. A team of EU ⁠veterinarians will visit the area this week to survey, provide advice and prepare a report with recommendations, the spokesperson said.

Mr Planas said about one-third of the country’s pork export certificates have been blocked because of ⁠the outbreak, though no farms have tested positive so far. Pig farms within a 20-km radius of the initial infection site are facing operating and sales restrictions.