Australia takes precautions over swine fever fears
As a major swine fever outbreak sweeps across Asia, leading to the deaths of millions of pigs, Australia has tightened biosecurity in the hopes of staving off its own outbreak of the disease
A 44-year-old woman from Vietnam was turned away from Australia and banned for three years after flying into Sydney airport with a suitcase full of food, which she failed to declare. The suitcase contained 22 pounds of food, including cooked pigmeat, which could conceivably have been carrying the African swine fever infection – outbreaks have been reported in all Vietnam’s cities and provinces, with more than 5.4 million pigs having to be culled as a result.
It is the first time that a visitor’s visa has been cancelled due to lying about concealed food, according to a tweet from Australia’s Agriculture Minister.
The current swine fever outbreak has spread at a worrying pace, affecting three continents since 2017. The disease has appeared in a new country practically every month in 2019, and there are fears that smuggled food which is then consumed by local pigs could aggravate the spread. According to customs officials, incidences of the virus in smuggled pork products have increased threefold over the past year.
While this strain of swine fever has not yet been observed to spread to humans, it is biologically possible that it could, so there is a major public safety concern aspect to the huge outbreak, as well as the harm that it has done to animals – and to Asia’s pork industry.