Numbers and alarms on swine fever in Italy
A sector worth 11 billion, made up of 70 thousand people, brought to its knees by swine fever. The affected regions, the farmers' alarm and how the government is moving towards this emergency. All the details
African swine fever (ASF), which has been circulating in Italy since the first months of 2022 , is now really worrying farmers, who are asking the government to intervene immediately to save a sector worth 11 billion and on which 70,000 people depend.
Here are the numbers and measures announced by the government to deal with the emergency.
DATA FROM THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL BULLETIN
According to the latest epidemiological bulletin released by the Ministry of Health and updated to date, the number of municipalities involved in the epidemic has reached 588.
There are six Regions involved: Piedmont, Liguria, Lazio, Calabria, Sardinia and Lombardy. The highest numbers are reported in the province of Alessandria, where there are 490 positive wild boars for swine fever, 270 in the province of Genoa and 153 in the province of Savona. In the province of Reggio Calabria, on the other hand, there are 413 infected pigs and 189 in the province of Pavia. For a total of 1,031 wild boars and 609 pigs.
Precisely in the Pavia area, where the number of infections is so high, the owner of a pig farm in Zinasco, and a veterinarian of the company are being investigated by the Pavia Public Prosecutor's Office with the crime hypothesis of not having reported the first cases of deaths suspicions of animals that occurred in early August, thus causing an outbreak of swine fever.
THE NUMBERS OF THE SECTOR
As denounced by CIA-Agricoltori Italiani , taking the situation head on is urgent because, although swine fever does not represent a risk to human health as it is not transmissible to humans, it is a very serious disease that causes death of domestic pigs and wild boars, with serious economic and social consequences on the entire sector at a national and international level.
In fact, the pig sector is also very important for exports and, as explained by Antonio Sorice, president of the Italian Society of Preventive Veterinary Medicine (SIMeVeP), "the export of Italian agri-food products is one of the strengths of our economy : just think of Parma hams, San Daniele hams, but also other products deriving from pork that are in demand all over the world”.
However, "to be exported to countries where African swine fever does not exist, it is required that the products must leave the Italian territory free from disease, when the disease spreads in farms, other countries of the world impose a ban on imports of products from our country with enormous economic damage".
“Immediately deploy all the tools available to deal with swine fever and save a sector with a turnover of 11 billion. It is necessary to proceed immediately with organized and systematic culling in the area to reduce the pressure of wild boars, as envisaged by the extraordinary plan, and to secure pig farms, especially in the areas most at risk, guaranteeing resources and support for the sector". These are the requests made by CIA-Agricoltori Italiani at the urgent meeting on the African swine fever situation, held at the Ministry of Defence, with ministers Guido Crosetto and Francesco Lollobrigida, undersecretaries Patrizio La Pietra and Marcello Gemmato and the extraordinary commissioner for swine fever Vincenzo Caputo.
"The situation has now become critical and it is necessary to act in a concrete way to safeguard all Made in Italy pig farming, on which 70,000 workers depend", echoes Gabriele Carenini, CIA national manager for wildlife. "For this reason, the willingness announced by the Minister of Defense to employ qualified personnel to contain the number of ungulates, as we had requested for some time, is very important".
WHAT FARMERS ARE ASKING FOR
Carenini said he was satisfied with the imminent establishment of a permanent control room with all the agricultural representations and the ministries of Agriculture, the Environment, Health and Defence, to support Commissioner Caputo's action in the field, which the he defined as “an action that must be timely and decisive”.
Alessandro Beduschi, regional councilor for agriculture of Lombardy, instead reiterated the need to "increase the catches of wild boars that spread the virus", with the help of the executive to "strengthen these activities, using the army and civil protection , but also enhancing the role of hunters" and "also providing for unprecedented incentive systems", in addition to "biosecurity activities to create barriers around farms for which extraordinary resources are needed".
WHAT WILL THE GOVERNMENT DO?
In an interview on Primocanale , following the meeting with the president of the Liguria Region, Giovanni Toti, Caputo announced the next steps that will be taken in Liguria in particular: application of the new ordinance being published, in which institutions and confirmed some organizational moments, in particular the birth of territorial operational groups (Got), the figure of the bioregulator who can also be a hunter who has a particular predisposition for public service assignments for eradication plans and interdisciplinary moments made up of men and women who they come from the world of agriculture, the environment and health, who will set up an eradication plan to get the Liguria Region out of this pathology.
Caputo then hypothesized that "working well" it will take about 3-4 years to completely eradicate the problem.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/numeri-e-allarmi-sulla-peste-suina-in-italia/ on Fri, 01 Sep 2023 13:21:37 +0000.