Industry News

2024-04-23 07:25:10

A. Introduction to the African swine fever epidemic
At the beginning of August 2018, a sudden African swine fever (an acute, hemorrhagic, highly lethal and virulent infectious disease caused by African swine fever virus, hereinafter referred to as "non-plague") epidemic ruthlessly ravaged the land of China, destroying millions of pigs and destroying countless pig farms that pig farmers have painstakingly managed.
According to statistics, as of April 30, 2019, there have been 129 African swine fever outbreaks in 92 cities and counties in 31 provinces, including 126 cases of domestic pigs and 3 cases of wild boars. The OIE reported 1,125,961 deaths and culls (see Table 1 below).

Affected by the "non-plague" epidemic, China's pig industry has suffered a heavy blow. According to the survey data of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of 6 provinces in April, the production capacity of pigs in many places has declined significantly, ranging from 25% to 80% in some places, while in February, it was said that the number of sows that can reproduce fell by 5%, a year-on-year decrease of 19.1%;
Although Vice Premier Hu Chunhua asked local governments to effectively solve the problems of farmers who dare not raise, do not want to raise and cannot afford to raise, but in the face of the current "non-plague" situation, thinking of the pain of pigs suffering from "non-plague", the willingness of retail households to resume raising is basically zero.
Without pigs, pork consumption is empty talk. Due to the decrease in the number of pigs and the number of slaughters, the resulting gradual rise in meat prices is inevitable, and the import of pork has also increased, but it is a drop in the bucket for the huge domestic consumer market.
This "non-plague" epidemic has brought us animal husbandry and veterinary personnel too much to think about, and I will express my personal views below.
B, it brings us several enlightenments for the poultry industry
2.1 When the time comes, not only do you need to know what the disease is, but more importantly, you need to know how to prevent it.
At the beginning of the outbreak of "non-plague", many local pig farms did not know what disease their pigs were suffering from. There are no commercially available diagnostic test reagents, no private testing, no private isolation of viruses and storage of disease materials, and no random reporting of epidemic situations. Ordinary people know very little about epidemic prevention.
2.1.1 In view of foreign epidemics, important testing methods and epidemic prevention knowledge must be popularized. "Non-plague" is an exotic disease, which is a high-fever, highly contagious, and highly lethal infectious disease that infected domestic pigs and wild boars in Africa in 1921. In 1957, the contamination of food waste from flights infected some free-range pig farms around Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, and continued to develop diseases in Europe after leaving Africa. Many countries in Europe have made great efforts to prevent and control the disease, but the results have not been satisfactory. Since 2007, when it occurred in the Baltic Sea and around Russia, China was under threat, and the national veterinary prevention and control department has been paying close attention to it, organizing forces to make research and development reserves for its diagnostic testing technology, and instructing relevant departments to strictly guard against important foreign epidemics that need to be kept out. However, these diagnostic testing technologies and prevention and control knowledge have not been widely publicized and made known to ordinary pig farmers, so that when it really happens, most farmers do not know what "flying plague" is and how to prevent and control it. We may be accustomed to fighting a war of annihilation, fighting a big battle, for some basic, common-sense epidemic prevention and control methods, mainly rely on the farm's own managers to complete, the government's active intervention and epidemic prevention effect evaluation also only rely on the detection and monitoring of major epidemic antibodies, and the technical strength and prevention and control concepts of the farm are uneven, good and bad are very different, which provides a material basis for the occurrence and development of foreign epidemics.
For the poultry industry, in the SARS infection in 2003 and the H7N9 incident in Shanghai, Anhui and other places in 2013, there was no serious understanding of the causes and consequences, how it was transmitted, and how it was transmitted, and there was no organizational force to seriously and deeply follow up and study. A lot of things are gone.
2.1.2 The multi-version prevention and control emergency guidelines for post-event remediation are tantamount to an afterthought, and their role in the prevention and control of "non-plague" is questionable. After the occurrence of "non-plague", it was once in a state of loss of control; because of the lack of understanding of the biological characteristics of the "non-plague" virus, farmers talked about "non-pestilence" color change. I don't know where the epidemic came from. As a result, feed raw materials such as blood meal, kitchen waste, and contaminated slaughtered pork are almost all grass and trees. Subjective speculations such as water transmission, feed transmission, rat transmission, and environmental impact have emerged. Once a virulent infectious disease occurs, in order to prevent and control it, it is necessary to adhere to the four-character formula of "early, fast, strict, and small" summarized by infectious disease experts in the early years, so as to eliminate the source of infection, cut off the transmission route, and protect susceptible animals.
However, people who are full of economic consciousness do not take these magic weapons summed up by their predecessors to heart at all; they only want to reduce their own losses, completely ignoring the lives of others and the rise and fall of industries. Therefore, in less than half a year, the "non-plague" spread to the north and south of the river. To sum up, people's understanding of "non-plague" viruses has the following three misjudgments:
The first is to underestimate the resistance of the "non-plague" virus to the outside world; the virus has been trained in tropical Africa for hundreds of years, and has considerable resistance to the external environment and unimaginable survivability, but I did not expect that conventional pasteurization methods cannot completely kill the virus.
The second is to underestimate the infectivity of the "non-plague" virus, and the food waste generated by the express purchase of pork from the affected pig farms in the epidemic area can infect the pig farms. Therefore, it is not groundless for food waste to cause "non-plague".
Third, weak biosecurity measures provide convenience for the spread of the "non-plague" virus, pig farms of outsiders in and out at will, vehicles in and out at will, pig vehicles at will around the pig farm wandering and swaying, may bring disaster to the pig farm.
2.2 Biosecurity is the focus of epidemic prevention:
Before the occurrence of "non-plague", biosecurity measures such as personnel, vehicles, veterinary drugs, biological products and feed entering and leaving the pig farm were mostly downplayed flushing and aerosol disinfection. Most of them have never evaluated their disinfection measures, and some even pinch their noses and eyes, and the disinfection effect is quite poor. The reason is that the technicians think that the disinfection measures are too cumbersome and troublesome, and only the boss does not grasp it, and it is passable.
After the occurrence of "non-plague", incomplete biosecurity measures will bury the entire pig farm, therefore, because the boss attaches great importance to the implementation of biosecurity measures in an all-round way, emphasizing the importance of epidemic prevention details; At the expense of the construction of feed transfer towers, 3 kilometers away transfer stations for the sale of fat pigs, thorough disinfection of vehicles before entering the pig farm, and the purchase of high-quality disinfectants in large quantities at high prices. These measures fundamentally ensure the implementation of biosecurity measures and provide their own protective barriers for the prevention and control of the occurrence of "non-plague".
2.3 Public safety is really good
2.3.1 Public safety is the general environment, which is a local and even national breeding environment. If the inside of your farm is a little safe, but the polluted pig trucks are whistling back and forth around your farm, and the surrounding small farmers have no awareness of biosecurity and have sporadic illness, and even worse, for fear that the world will not be chaotic, littering "non-plague" dead pigs around your farm, in order to cause your farm to get sick and you can sell live pigs at a low price, your farm is no longer safe. Therefore, it is necessary to control the "non-plague" to a relatively small range as soon as possible. Although veterinary practitioners are aware of it, there are still the majority of people at the bottom of society who do not have these awareness. Therefore, at the beginning of the epidemic, many social individuals and entities still took the risk of smuggling smuggled pork-infected pork at low prices to sell it everywhere, which caused the rapid expansion of the epidemic and had a great adverse impact on the prevention and control of the epidemic.
2.3.2 Contaminated slaughterhouses are an important link in transmission that cannot be ignored. Although the slaughterhouse is the downstream industrial chain of the farm, there is a big epidemic prevention loophole in the sales of infected pigs and meat because it does not take into account the interests of the farm. For the sake of self-interest, try not to spend if you can reduce your spending. Therefore, in many places, slaughtering and transport trucks contaminated with the "non-plague" virus were skewered everywhere, and pork contaminated with the "non-plague" virus was sold everywhere. It has brought a lot of trouble to the farm, and the spread and epidemic of "non-plague" are suspected of being abused. In our fluorescence quantitative PCR detection of some submitted samples, the proportion of "non-distemper" virus nucleic acid positive in the samples sent by slaughterhouses was high.
2.3.3 Pigs that have died or are suspected to have died of "non-plague" cannot be dissected on the pig farm anywhere. Because the viral load in the blood of infected and dead pigs is large, once it is dissected at will in the wild, a large number of flies are easy to spread with poison, and at the same time, the polluted places are easy to form epidemic foci, which brings difficulties to the prevention and control of "non-plague" in the future. It is necessary to truthfully evaluate the viability of "non-distemper" viruses in the environment, and their viability in the wild should not be underestimated.
2.4 The application of nucleic acid PCR detection technology by veterinarians to diagnose major epidemic diseases has aroused a consensus among everyone.
As early as 2013, when the H7N9 incident occurred in Shanghai, the human doctor required a nucleic acid test to confirm whether the virus was infected, while the veterinarian insisted on using chicken embryos to isolate the virus for diagnosis.
In this "non-plague" detection and diagnosis, everyone unanimously recognized the use of fluorescence quantitative PCR to detect "non-plague" virus nucleic acid, which is simple, rapid, and highly specific and sensitive. It is one of the detection methods worth advocating. With the development of modern molecular biology and biochemistry, it has become fashionable to use PCR to detect viral nucleic acid in on-site real-time detection and diagnostic methods.
2.5 Correctly evaluate the role of the grassroots veterinary epidemic prevention system
In the process of preventing and controlling the "non-plague" epidemic, grassroots veterinary personnel inspected the farms on the spot, helped to send sick materials for testing and nucleic acid diagnosis, blocked highways, checked rural road intersections, checked quarantine certificates in different places, checked whether the pig carts were illegally smuggled, and actively publicized the significance of prevention and control, which played an indispensable role in the control of the epidemic after the onset of the disease.
On the other hand, at the beginning of the disease, the grass-roots veterinary personnel had a relatively light voice in the prevention and control of major epidemic diseases in the farm; due to the limited personnel, the supervision of the farm was not strict, and sometimes even turned a blind eye. This is really not suitable for the prevention and control of major epidemics such as "non-plague".
However, in the current system, the initiative of the prevention and control of major epidemic diseases in the country has been given to the breeding enterprises, so there are differences in understanding, regional differences, differences in the management level of different enterprises, differences in prevention and control measures and differences in the implementation of measures, etc., resulting in each breeding company has its own prevention and control slogan and specific measures, the country can not really unify the ideological understanding, unified action plan, unified evaluation of the effect of measures, unified prevention and control in the first place. In this sense, in the future, the government should increase the control of epidemic prevention in farms, and truly give full play to the active supervision role of grassroots veterinary personnel in disease prevention and treatment. Only in this way will the "non-plague" not fly all over the sky.
2.6 Good hardware facilities of the farm are necessary conditions for good biosecurity
With the reduction of pigs now, most of the farms that can survive from the "non-plague" infection environment are those with good hardware facilities, reasonable structure and layout of the farm, excellent biosecurity, and the effective physical space distance from other surrounding breeding units (such as more than 750 points according to the 1,000-point score of PIC), and farms with high management level.
Under such conditions, even if the infection is infected, the onset is mild, the prevention and control is easier, and the loss is relatively small.
It is no wonder that the real estate tycoon, after listening to the report of his subordinates, lamented the high amount of money to build a pig farm, saying that it would not cost so much money to build a residential building.
Good farm hardware can reduce the use of veterinary drugs and veterinary vaccines, thereby improving the health of pigs and higher feed returns; As a result, farming has a high level of profitability to reward high levels of construction costs. This should be the direction of the aquaculture industry in the future.
C. Warnings and reflections on the poultry industry
"Non-plague" is far from over, and there is a serious shortage of pigs in some local areas. Although the consumption of poultry meat and eggs is on the rise, and the poultry industry, especially breed poultry, is doing quite well; The stones of other mountains can attack jade, and the "non-plague" event can at least bring us the following thoughts:
3.1 Without adequate diagnostic testing technology and vaccine R&D reserves, an outbreak of an exotic epidemic will be a disaster for the entire industry.
3.2 Diagnostic testing technologies and methods must be widely publicized before a major epidemic occurs, and training and learning should be organized to enhance the common understanding of the industry.
3.3 Enhance the awareness of prevention and control among the whole people. In the face of the epidemic and interests, it is necessary to distinguish the historical status and role of all social strata, and recognize the fragility and human weakness of different social strata in the face of interests.
3.4 At the national government level, we should strongly enhance the supervision of breeding enterprises in various places, strengthen the learning and guidance of national policies and systems, actively cooperate with the work of grassroots veterinary station personnel, increase veterinary law enforcement, and prevent problems before they occur.
3.5 All breeding enterprises should be self-cleaning and self-disciplined, and should do a good job in self-cultivation farms, villages, towns and counties at all levels of regional biosecurity; Establish a local biosecurity environment to ensure that there is no problem in the national environment.
3.6 The breeding enterprises in the breeding income at the same time, from the breeding zoning, farm site planning, farm hardware facilities design and breeding equipment optimization is very hard, the farm to avoid competition with people living environment, to achieve effective biological space distance isolation, to avoid the risk of zoonotic diseases.
The above is a peep's opinion, and I hope that peers will criticize and correct what is wrong.

References: (omitted)

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