By Nacho Doce and Joan Faus
BELLATERRA, Spain, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Spain has called in its military to help contain an outbreak of African swine fever near Barcelona, a move aimed at protecting the country’s multi-billion-euro pork export industry.
Officials suspect the virus may have spread after a wild boar ate contaminated food, possibly a sandwich brought from outside Spain.
Authorities confirmed on Friday that two wild boar found dead had tested positive for the disease. A 6-km exclusion zone was set up around the affected area in Bellaterra, on the far side of the Collserola mountain range from the coastal city.
Three 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 Monday, who will use drones to locate and remove potential infected animals.
“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 told local radio on Monday.
African swine fever, 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.
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.
RISK TO SPAIN’S PORK INDUSTRY
As officials await final test results, 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 neighbouring 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.
Spain’s agriculture minister Luis Planas said Saturday that about one-third of the country’s pork export certificates have been blocked as a result of the outbreak, though no farms have tested positive so far. Pork farms within a 20-km radius of the initial infection site are facing operating and sales restrictions.
(Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels and Emma Pinedo in Madrid. Writing by Emma Pinedo, editing by Aislinn Laing and Ros Russell)
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