Location Shanghai China
# 6996
The Huangpu river - a tributary of the Yangtze that rolls across 113 km of China’s countryside before emptying into the East China Sea – provides many of the 23 million residents of Shanghai with their drinking water.
This weekend, various news reports indicate that between 900 hundred and 3000 dead pigs have been retrieved from the Huangpu river - dumped for reasons, and by persons, thus far unknown.
A statement – machine translated – from Shanghai’s government website (www.shac.gov.cn) this morning reads:
Floating the Huangpu Jiang Songjiang paragraph waters the dead pigs sampling detection
The the floating dead pig incident in the Huangpu Jiang Songjiang paragraph waters, the Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center, in conjunction with the animal epidemic control center in Songjiang District, collected at the scene a dead pig heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidney, lymph nodes, tonsils and other viscera samples 5 sets.
Shanghai Animal Disease Control Center laboratory using fluorescence PCR method to detect the six pathogens, including swine foot-and-mouth disease, swine fever, highly pathogenic blue ear pig disease and other major animal diseases, as well as swine pseudorabies, porcine circovirus The three kinds of pig disease, porcine epidemic diarrhea and other common disease.
Detection of porcine circovirus pathogen positive results from a sample, the remaining samples were negative for all test items. We will continue to trace the source, the investigation of the cause and teamed up with brothers areas and take measures to put an end to throw to the river to throw dead pig.
Note: porcine circovirus disease is caused by porcine circovirus type 2 an infectious disease of pigs, pig infectious epidemics hair a more in recent years, does not belong to the zoonoses.
The detection of porcine circovirus (PCV) type 2 among the 5 samples tested doesn’t tell us much. Not considered a zoonotic threat, PCV can be found in pigs worldwide (see University of Iowa site Porcine Circovirus Associated Diseases (PCVD, PCVAD)).
PCV is usually associated with a slow and progressive `wasting’ disease, casting doubt over whether it would have killed thousands of pigs simultaneously.
So the suspicion remains of another – as yet unidentified – reason behind these pigs deaths.
CNN International this morning is reporting that a large-scale die off of pigs has been ongoing in the nearby city of Jiaxing since the first of the year.
Hundreds of dead pigs fished from Shanghai river
By Katie Hunt and Zhang Dayu
(Excerpt)
A local newspaper in Jiaxing, a city in Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, reported on March 6 that tens of thousands of pigs had died of an animal disease in a major pig farming village in the past two months.
"According to our records, 10,078 pigs died in January, another 8,325 died in February. More than 300 pigs die everyday in our village, and we barely have any space left to dispose of the dead pigs," a local villager was quoted by the paper as saying.
Over the years we’ve seen other instances where diseased livestock have been dumped into rivers – an illegal disposal method that simply spreads the problem downstream (see here, here, and here).
During early 2009 (see The Winter Of Our Disbelief), a number of dead H5N1-infected chickens washed up on the shores of Hong Kong, which led many to believe that large numbers of chickens were being disposed of somewhere up the Pearl River in Guangdong province.
The following year, more infected birds turned up on the beaches and islands of Hong Kong.
Despite local and internet uproar, Shanghai authorities continue to assure that the city’s drinking water is safe. This assessment from the local government:
Shanghai Water Authority, said the requirements related to water supply enterprises to be taken to strengthen the conventional treatment process, an appropriate increase in finished water residual chlorine to 2.0 mg / l, in order to ensure the safety of the water supply. Strengthen the monitoring of the quality of raw water.
The district water departments related to tracking and monitoring of raw water quality and laboratory analysis, focusing on oxygen consumption, ammonia nitrogen, total bacterial count, total coliforms and other indicators. At present, the indicators are in the normal range.
And finally, from Xinhua news (the media arm of the Chinese government), we get this rather Spartan report.
Pig virus detected in Shanghai river water
2013-03-11 13:24:51
SHANGHAI, March 11 (Xinhua) -- A pig virus has been found in a water sample of a river where 1,200 dead pigs had been fished out, Shanghai authorities said.
Laboratory tests found porcine circovirus (PCV) in one of the water samples taken from Huangpu River, a water source for city residents, sources with Shanghai municipal agricultural commission said Monday.
The virus causes porcine circovirus disease in pigs but does not spread to human beings, a commission statement said.
All other tests of the river water provided negative results, including tests for common pig-borne diseases such as foot and mouth, swine fever, hog cholera and epidemic diarrhea.
Authorities are investigating where the dead pigs came from. The commission said they are working with neighboring provinces to trace their source, and have warned riverside residents to refrain from dumping animals into the river.
Local media reports said the pigs mainly came from Shanghai's neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces.
The city and Songjiang district governments retrieved the pigs from Friday night to Sunday.
If and when we know more, I’ll update this story.
