MOSCOW, July 7 (Itar-Tass) - African swine fever has spread to virtually all the regions in the European part of Russia and some of them face a tangible threat of a shutdown of all the hog raising enterprises, Nikolai Vlassov, a deputy director of the federal sanitary watchdog agency Rospotrebnadzor told a news conference.
“The African swine fever has turned up victorious almost on all the European part of Russia,” he said. “It’s either infected already or it runs the risk of being infected. Unless the federal and regional authorities change their attitude to the problem, nothing will change for the better.”
The situation is the most complicated in the Tver region, 170 km to the northwest of Moscow, and in the regions neighboring Tver, as well as in the Voronezh region, which is the hotbed of the outbreak of the infection.
“The pig breeding industry’s direct losses are already running into billions of rubles and indirect losses, into dozens of billions,” Vlassov said.
He stressed the need for a special federal program and a clearly formulated veterinarian legislation, “since the measures that the separate regions are trying to effectuate fail to bring any particular results.”
The African swine fever does not pose a risk to humans but it wipes out populations of pigs. The only way to stop the spread of this epizootic disease is a full culling of pig stock on whole farms.