Time to go kosher.
Jews and Muslims (halal) have avoided this for 2,000 years.
Pigs are filthy animals that feed on garbage.
You are what you eat.
5
@Simon Sez Not so!!! Pigs fed on grains are also at risk from African Swine Fever (ASF), which does not infect humans.
The kosher laws have nothing to do with disease prevention. All meats - improperly cooked - can spread disease, e.g., salmonella. Pork, properly cooked, is perfectly safe to eat.
The kosher laws are rooted in spiritual values. So, no predator animal is "kosher", i.e., fit to eat.
5
Some commenters refer to this swine disease as an epidemic or pandemic. The "dem" in epidemic refers to people, as in the Greek demos. The word for illness among an animal population is epizootic.
3
This isn’t a crisis, eat plants people- better for the animals, your health and the environment. Think about it. Wake up.
5
Factory farming needs to stop everywhere. If we all knew how these animals were treated - pigs, chickens, turkeys - we'd NEVER eat a piece of meat again. It is inhumane, sickening, and all for making meat cheaper. And not to mention the antibiotics these animals are given to make them grow faster.
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@Sarah99
And meat eating contributes to climate change. One of the most distressing points in this article is that Brazil is responding by burning down even more of the Amazon in order to produce even more beef and chicken to fill the demand created by the shortfall in pork.
5
Just another manifestation of the overtaxed and unstructured world economy we live in.
Everything decided on today with little or no consideration of the future.
4
Meat consumption may be driven by rising affluence in China and other South Asian countries. But as the world burns for an ever voracious appetite for grazing lands, and methane emissions from farm animals stoke climate change, and hundreds of millions of intelligent and emotional beings like pigs are bred in inhumane and contaminated conditions only to meet inhumane ends, China is reaping what its sown. Whoever said affluence correlated with enlightenment.
7
Factory farming!
Hopefully the farmers who inflict this cruelty on animals will go broke and the people who support this cruelty will have to pay huge dollars for their bacon
7
Mr Peng's pigs were likely buried in a butcher shop. Three years investment is an awful large amount of effort; with the fenced pigs probably bringing a somewhat lower price the insurance money will make up the difference. Hopefully the ASF was completely sanitized by human intestines, otherwise the ASF might end up fertilizing crops or fish. This is, after all, China.
Closer to home, the recent articles on the feral pigs over running areas in North America imply that control of ASF could be difficult if ASF gained a significant foothold in the feral population.
5
This is exactly the same mindset which turned a local epidemic in China into a potential global pandemic between November 2002 and July 2003. SARS was a deadly emerging disease exported from China to Hong Kong and from there to the rest of the world.
The Chinese authorities were completely incapable of recognizing that with a disease causing agent on the loose and no effective barriers in place, the problem will grow exponentially in time. This is just basic biology.
Instead, with a top down controlling mindset, the responses are way shy of the mark and exactly the opposite of what is desired or intended happens, the disease gets out of control.
Sixteen years have passed since SARS. Has anything been learned?
So there is a persistent control freak mindset about that refuses to reflect and learn from the past, that refuses to take responsibility for mistakes, which results in a loss of control. This resonates strongly with what many experience these days daily in Hong Kong.
Think about that!
10
For all who are touting a plant based diet there have been instances of E. coli affecting romaine lettuce. There have been other instances of contaminated vegetables and fruits. The problem is the way animals and crops are raised for maximum profit not so much for farmers as for agribusiness. Ain’t capitalism grand?
3
This could be an incredible opportunity for the Chinese to shift its consumption of animal products to more sustainable plant based food. The increasing toll of carbon emissions from animal agriculture is becoming catastrophic to the world. The improvement to health for the Chinese, who are suffering from a pandemic of diabetes, would also be a major benefit. Hopefully, the world will learn from this seeming “catastrophe” that ever-increasing amounts of animal food is not possible.
5
I was worried when I saw all the news coverage about Swine Flu epidemic wiping out South Korean pig farmers (there was some type of gov't compensation I recall) and Inspectors covered on overalls checking each and every car at the inspection point may further depress pork market but I know now that is the correct approach. Showing that the gov't takes it seriously and it's safe to eat pork that's being circulated in the market.
4
@Young R. You make a good point about the value of thorough culling. Countries that have taken the disease very seriously from the very start have tended to fare better. As for human consumption, there is no evidence that African swine fever poses a danger to people. But veterinarians recommend that table scraps not be fed to pigs, as these scraps may be contaminated.
4
Just when the Trump administration has rolled back USDA regulations of the pork industry. Another reason to be a vegetarian particularly if you live in the US. Not only good for the planet but good for your family's health as well.
15
Overall this is a good thing, impacting nothing but pigs and humans. Domestic pigs are dying in huge numbers, but all of them die young anyway as they're raised for food. Humans won't die from this, but they'll have to eat less pork. Eating more vegetables instead is good for the environment.
Hopefully the end result will be less pig farming, it's wasteful and destructive to the environment. If it gets the CCP to be a bit faster on the uptake, that might help for the next epidemic, and there will always be a next epidemic.
If this causes some hardship for humans, well humans deserve it. We are in the process of driving about one million species extinct, so compared to that, this epidemic is completely unimportant.
8
After more than 25 years without a case of swine fever, Japan's pork producers were also hit this year, but with the presumed vector being wild boars. Japan's prefectures responded with vaccinations both of domestic pigs but also experimental vaccination of wild boars.
A useful followup would be to report on the state of swine vaccination in China.
5
@Alan Engel There is no reliable, effective vaccine against African swine fever, although there have been many attempts to develop such a vaccine. Culling has been the only proven remedy.
6
I spent some time living in Tianjin, Communist China.
I was being driven to the bus station when it was time for me to leave.
My local Chinese language teacher was driving and narrowly missed hitting a man on a bike.
She muttered, One less person is nothing here. We have way too many of them already.
It was a delight to live in the land of the dictatorship of the Proletariat where Sanders/Warren would be elected in a heartbeat.
9
I was bicycling around southern England during the tail end of that nation's Foot and Mouth outbreak back in 2001. If you've forgotten, FMD is a disease of cloven-footed animals: cows, sheep, deer, bison, elk, etc.
One morning, I encountered a group of about fifty very annoyed club bicyclists. The police had blocked off their route to prevent the spread of FMD. They explained that while they'd been chatting with the police, a deer had jumped from one pasture into the next, thus completely exposing the ludicrous nature of the road closure as far as the bicyclists were concerned.
That encounter raised my awareness of another key fact about that kind of small-scale farming: a typical sheep or cattle farm in England often depends on several small grazing meadows dating back to medieval times spread out around a village, and thus from time to time farmers literally drive small flocks of sheep or herds of cows along short stretches of public roads to get them from one pasture to the next. And of course poop happens along the way, leaving plenty of stuff for the next flock or herd to step in, which is one of the ways FMD is spread.
Of course, because neighboring villages in the south of England are often less than a mile apart, it was easy for FMD to spread between villages. China sounds like it has a worse version of this problem.
Ironically, as bad as they are in other ways, factory farming practices help minimize that kind of risk here in the US.
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@Don Blume This is an accurate assessment on disease risk. Beijing is now trying to build an archipelago of factory pig farms with high biosecurity standards, in the hope that China may be able to revive pig production at these locations.
2
It’s a good time to be kosher. Or halal. Or vegetarian, for that matter.
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@David G. Right, because no other animal that we eat can get any number of diseases. Please don't mix religion into this.
3
If people gave up meat, there wouldn't be an issue, at least one like this. Cut down meat, protect yourself from such diseases and fight global warming along the way.
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@Asher Except for the countless e-coli outbreaks with all sorts of vegetables. Lettuce, spinach, on and on.
1
China has recently also got a few cases of human plague. Let's see how it copes.
4
That was bubonic plague, just two cases, and it's completely unimportant and no threat. Easy to cure with modern medicine, about 300 people get it every year worldwide, it is just not a big deal. Too bad really, because what the world needs most is less humans.
5
Eating pigs (and beef) is so obviously related to the rapid demise of the earth. I swear, man is watching the earth die while obviously munching on bacon and not seeing the connection.
13
African Swine Fever (ASF) blind-sided China's leaders, who had years to prepare. ASF reached Eurasia in 2007, apparently when a ship from an African port docked in ex-Soviet Georgia. That ship's kitchen waste - which confained ASF-infected pork - was sold as "pig swill", without having been cooked. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485109/ .
China's leaders' claim their monopoly of political power rests on their superb governance skills. Elections aren't needed: no one in China is better suited to govern.
The ASF pandemic exposes Chinese leaders' fallibility. ASF first was reported in China in August, 2018. As truth-tellers in China have paid with their lives, officials tend to suppress or to down-play "unpleasant" news.
So, Chinese leaders were slow to contain ASF. A year later, the disease was found throughout China. It has spread into Southeast Asia. Poor farmers suffer most.
So far, ASF hasn't made it to the Western Hemisphere. There was an outbreak in Brazil in the early 1980s. By a prompt and resolute response, the Brazilians eradicated ASF.
It was recently reported that on a flight from China to the US, passengers were offered a snack that contained pork. The pork may have come from an ASF-free country. I'd not bet on that.
The FAA should ban landings at US airports by planes that have - or have had - aboard, any pork products. Pigs don't fly and can't swim across oceans. Only humans can bring ASF to the Western Hemisphere.
16
@Jay E. Simkin The trump administration has proposed changing agricultural rules to allow pork producers to self-monitor the health of the pigs they send to slaughter, and the quality of the resulting pork - drastically reducing the role of USDA inspectors in pork safety.
If ASF arrives here, I’m afraid it’ll get quite a foothold before the Government even becomes aware of the problem.
3
FYI, both Koreas need to be included in the count of countries suffering from the virus. Please reference the massive effort of SK to isolate and exterminate feral pigs from entering from the north.
5
In an article like this, it's suprising there's no mention of the Chinese buying Smithfield Foods in 2013:
"Smithfield Foods, Inc., is a meat-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia, in the United States, and a wholly owned subsidiary of WH Group of China. Founded in 1936 as the Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph W. Luter and his son, the company is the largest pig and pork producer in the world. In addition to owning over 500 farms in the US, Smithfield contracts with another 2,000 independent farms around the country to grow Smithfield's pigs."
The Chinese government is shrewd and sinister. By buying Smithfield, all of the pollution caused by these large farms pollute America! Then the slaughtered product gets shipped to China.
In an alternate universe, imagine if people were bred, farmed, and slaughtered in the same inhumane manner that we treat pigs, cows, goats, chickens, sheep, ducks...basically most animals except for dogs and cats.
30
The sooner the Chinese people get rid of the CCP, the better off they will be.
5
Let’s not forget that Chinese farmers’ reckless and apparently unregulated use of colliston, the antibiotic of last resort for several deadly bacterial infections, has increased resistance to the drug, which could threaten the unhindered spread of fatal epidemic illness. So mismanagement of the African swine fever epidemic is hardly the first example of Chinese agricultural practices spilling over and creating potentially devastating global consequences. But “the future belongs to China,” and greedy corporations will suck up to the Chinese as long as doing so keeps their pockets bulging. So don’t expect much of a punitive international response.
Just as depressing is the increased demand for meat surrogates from the incompetent Chinese response the ASF problem creating an incentive for more rainforest destruction in Brazil for cattle grazing. Hence, the “lungs of the world” in the Amazon are being further choked off. And we thought “globalization” was supposed to advance civilization and improve our collective well-being...
13
They all need to become Kosher participants.
1
Better to not eat meat.
3
Nature’s way of telling us not to eat pigs or any other animals!
10
How many of those diseased pigs were slaughtered to sell? Chinese are not known for strong food safety.
9
Why China responses slowly? Pigs with swine flu were first imported from their big brother Russia. End of story.
1
Pork production on a global scale is inhumane, environmentally damaging, and bad for public health. As China's population has begun to eat more meat, their rates of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease have increased commensurately. I have no empathy for these people and their obsession with pork meat - it will do them more good than they realize to abstain, even if it is for a short time.
13
My question is : why does the United States of America import Chinese - made generic medications for (our) human consumption when China has no quality control?? What need does the greatest country on earth have if this?
36
This should surprise no one. Industrial animal farming causes pandemics. Factory farms are the perfect environment for evolving new antibiotic and vaccine resistant diseases, some of which will inevitably jump to humans.
22
It sounds like it's the exact opposite. From the article: "Stopping the epidemic was always going to be tough. Small farms, often packed together in crowded agricultural areas, produce nearly half of China’s pigs. To stop diseases from spreading, Chinese officials have to reach millions of traditional small farmers." Just a handful of large industrial farms can implement new safety procedures much more easily than a million small farms.
10
Countries that are psychopathically cruel to animals are responsible for the spread of these diseases. China's latest response to the pork shortage caused by ASF? To breed 1,000 pound hogs that are too heavy to even stand up. The inhumane conditions in which birds are raised and contained in China led to the spread of Bird Flu.
35
@Melissa Not so!!! The vast majority of poultry in China are raised on small farms, where pigs, poultry and persons are proximate, i.e., mingle freely and are exposed to the environment every day.
Such exposure means farmed, free-range ducks, geese and chickens can contract bird flu from over-flying wild birds, whose droppings carry the virus. If China's poultry were all raised indoors, they'd not be exposed as now they are.
Further, because pigs can host both bird flu and human flu viruses, pigs are perfect "mixing vessels", from which new strains of flu viruses emerge. Flu viruses mutate constantly.
China's myriad small farms are the perfect setting for a mutation, that produces a strain of flu that is highly lethal and highly contagious. The H5N1 bird flu virus is pretty lethal, but not very contagious: a single, brief exposure usually does not result in infection.
China's farm sector's structure - myriad small farms - resembles that of the United States a century ago. The end-World War I flu pandemic may have originated on a farm in Haskell County, Kansas.
That pandemic killed about two percent of those exposed, or about 50,000,000 world-wide. The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed about half of those infected.
In short, what you think is so in China is not so, as to poultry. The sooner China switches to industrialized poultry breeding, the less likely will be the emergence in China of a sneeze-transmissible and highly-lethal bird flu, that can infect humans.
10
Pig guts are essential for production of drug called Heparin, anticoagulant crucial for open heart surgery and many medical conditions.Around 60% of Heparin in USA comes from China. So far FDA states that we have enough supplies of this drug, but if problem with African Swine Fever persists, we can imagine consequences. How smart is to have supply of essential medication from one source?
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@Marco
many ORs and hospitals use beef heparin. some people cannot use pig heparin. also, insulin is made from pigs which is just one type
1
China has done much to stem the spread of ASF but one does not get that from this article. ASF is a lethal disease of hogs but China is a very large country and it is difficult to find all possible specimens which are infected. The Chinese government established a "clean" herd and is also pushing research of this hog disease. Once the clean herd reaches a critical size it will serve as the nucleus of a rejuvenated breeding program.
Yes, the government did say they would buy pork from America but are also buying pork from other nations. American pork producers us antibiotics so I expect this will be just a temporary expedient for China.
5
There is an unbelievably simple answer to this problem. We can stop eating meat.
31
@Rogue 1303 nope, meat is delicious.
8
@Rogue 1303
We are carnivores by design.
Eat all the veggies you want but don't hassle the rest of us that love animal flesh.
Sorry, a steady diet of weeds, beets and brown rice don't hack it for most of us.
10
Carnivores by design. What a laugh! Ever compare your teeth to those of a true carnivore? Even a housecat would leave humans in the dust when it comes to tearing meat off the bone. The human body does not thrive on meat, and there's plenty of studies out there to prove it.
3
Has this affected the rest of the world's pork supply? Seems implausible that it was contained solely in China does it not?
As for the "limits of top down approach" to problems? Isn't that the same way we oversee these things in the US?
Really a lot of gaps in this article NYT.
3
@Chris Africa, Southeast Asia and possible the fringes of Europe.
The current crisis with the African imported swine epidemic is a metaphor for how top down veterinary as well as human medical care operates. Someone's ox is ALWAYS getting gored when there is a need to alter the status quo. When the influential person/group whose actions needs altered for the benefit of society are high up in the administrative state, then, changes don't happen, or, if they do happen , very slowly. To those who wouldn't like to have the consequences of their socialistic ideology in their medical care perpetrated upon themselves; expect delay, denial of medical care. China provides an example of such a mis-belief outcome. Someone at the top is ALWAYS meddling to preserve some sort of home turf. You are the pawn in the health care chess game, at times, to be sacrificed. Currently, a countries' significant dietary protein source is being subjected to upper echelons pocketbook decisions.
1
Pretty soon it will be human epidemics because there are so many humans and they live so close together and the vectors are spreading with climate change. Very sad to think of such suffering.
23
@Will Hogan
Agreed.
I believe that's how Mother Earth will take care of business and put an end to our abuse of other species and our abuse of the environment. There will most likely be a pandemic that will annihilate millions or billions of us.
It won't be pretty.
16
@ Astrid very true indeed. The writing is on the wall. What does anyone expect after decades of neglect, abuse and ignoring the facts?
4
A recent NYT article about feral hogs in the US and Canada described hunters transporting them in pickups to new areas for shooting fun.
But it failed to mention the possibility of feral hogs as potential vectors for African Swine Fever on hog farms.
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@Look Ahead
I thought I read in that article that the feral hogs are potential ASF vectors.
4
Is there no vaccine for this swine flu? There are vaccines for many diseases of livestock (i.e., anthrax), but farmers do not use them. Why not?
2
There has yet to be a vaccine produced. Scientists are working hard to make one but there are more than 20 genotypes of “African Swine Fever” which make it even more difficult. Vaccines are widely used on production farms, but in disease free herds with limited risk to being infected by certain pathogens, vaccines will not be used - particularly live vaccines.
3
@George Tyrebyter This is NOT swine flu. African Swine Fever (ASF) is a hemorrhagic fever, akin to ebola in humans. ASF does not infect humans.
The ASF virus is large, complex, and very hardy. Its size and complexity - the number of proteins that compose it - slows efforts to find a vaccine.
The virus can survive for months in frozen meat. It can be spread in meat, manture, vehicles/clothing, etc.
Even if a vaccine were "discovered" tomorrow, testing would require a couple of years.
10
You cannot eat 5G.
15
Marinating a dollar in BBQ sauce and a long slow roast in the oven might make it edible.
Question: Trump says China will buy $50 billion in agricultural goods (i.e. corn and soybeans) in Phase One of his trade deal. Given that much of the corn and soybeans are usually used to feed pigs, what is China supposed to do with all that corn and soybeans?
8
@Andy
They could eat the corn and soybeans...
25
not our problem.
I bet they back out of the deal.
China has a vast propaganda machine, enforced by strict censorship.
Its true economic liabilities are often not apparent.
42
Wild stuff. China is basically a third world country in many aspects.
20
A question: Didn’t Congress just cut many pork inspectors from next year’s budget?
90
The USA once suffered similarly (Upton Sinclaire!). Bad actors abound, and those who will cheat and harm others is universal.
Today, you have to be brave to buy any food products from China. They pretend to be modern, but are in fact like 1901 USA.
83
@David
I've been avoiding food from China for a very long time - and will continue to do so.
18
@David
I don't think that conditions for workers in today's slaughterhouses are much or any better than what was described in the Jungle. Sinclair himself was disillusioned by the fact in the wake of his novel that Americans demanded better quality assurance of their meats while little was done to protect the workers.
No wonder why this occupation is still the domain of powerless immigrants.
15
this is why they took tariffs off beef and pork imports from Canada. we should have asked for so much more having them over the barrel, so to speak. like releasing the 2 people they have in prison.
25
We need to eat lss meat or none. So do the Chinese.
70
@dr. c.c.
Sorry to bust your bubble.
The Chinese eat tons of meat. Usually, chicken, fish and pork. I know; I lived there.
Their amounts of meat consumed are less than ours, however.
No big steaks for them. More like pieces of beef that is part of a rice-veggie based meal.
But only Buddhists there are vegetarians by and large.
2
"... and shows the limits of Beijing’s top-down approach to problems"
NYTimes, please enlighten me, what method other than a "top-down approach" should a government adopt in times of infectious disease pandemic? Letting the free market decide? Democracy from pig farmers?
81
@Jason i think he meant top down from the centre and not allowing local authorities more leeway in how they implement overall strategy.
33
@Jason
I read the comment as meaning that a government that dictates, rather than listens, and is arbitrary in both punishments and rewards, often has little idea of what is actually happening on the ground. Thus, a dictatorial government learns of problems late, it does not have the habit or ability to listen to the affected stakeholders to learn whether its remedial policies will work (or are working), and the people have no sense of participation in the solutions to the problems, so the solutions are less effective.
In crises an authoritarian regime may have a tactical advantage over representative regimes, because in theory it can make the difficult decisions that have to be made. But the history of the CCP has been one of using its monopoly on power solely to perpetuate that monopoly, or engaging in serial lunacy (Great Leap Forward; Cultural Revolution) rather than imposing enlightened but unpopular decisions.
22
@Sholto Yup they meant centralized, not top down.
4
"Mr. Peng, the farmer, said that when he slaughtered his pigs, he had panicked and buried them in secrecy, and so had no record of what became of them. "
Why would he panic and bury them in secrecy, if he is doing what is expected of him?
7
@Rajesh he is supposed to have reported it to the local authorities. This way he does not need to.
5
@Sholto
The point being - He does not have any motivation to hide it from local authorities.. if what he did was what they would have recommended anyway...
3
@Rajesh It's China. The right thing could be the wrong thing five minutes later and then off you and your family go for "re-education".
1
The statistics in this article are incredible: a one-fifth reduction in China's pork production is equal to the entire US pork production; half of all pork products arriving in Australia are contaminated; pork prices in China have more than doubled; overall meat prices in world commodity markets have risen 20 percent; the UN official says "We don't think there's enough pork in the world to offset China's shortfall."
This is certainly a story about governmental failure: it appears that local farmers have simply butchered and sold their infected pigs instead of burying them as instructed. But to me, the really shocking thing is that the event appears to demonstrate the limits of our *global* food production system. Very scary!
98
@Gkhan
"a one-fifth reduction in China's pork production is equal to the entire US pork production"
Well, considering China has roughly four times the US population, I'm not surprised they produce (and consume) a lot more pork. I would think pork is far more prevalent in different Chinese provincial cuisines than, say, beef. It is often minced and added to a whole range of vegetable dishes (e.g. beancurd with minced pork) or noodle preparations or even fried rice, aside from being eaten as a dish in itself.
6
@Gkhan There is an even more ominous portent about global food production. We are already seeing wide scale interruptions in global food production as global warming advances. In the midwestern USA it was floods this year. In Central America, it has been repeated droughts. In Africa it has also been droughts. The lesson from the loss of so much of China's pork production is this: We don't run out of food slowly. Food production and consumption is a just-in-time thing. The vectors of increasing human population and unpredictable food production suggest famines.
14
Terrifying how devastating infectious disease can be. How will we manage the next human pandemic?
Also, how does this situation illustrate the failings of top down government?Someone please explain.
3
@The F.A.D. Exactly. And Bhopal, Katrina, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Flint water supply, etc., show the limits of a free market approach. Surely there must be a better way.
21
@The F.A.D. ASF is only so deadly because for lack of a vaccine the only way to stop the spreading is culling. That approach would be unlikely to be accepted in case of a human pandemic. At least where I live.
Vaccines exist, but the vaccinated animals cannot be told apart from infected animals, both have antibodies that the test detects, so they cannot be traded, moved or exported. China, not so much worried about exporting (their priority is importing, not exportinh, see article: moving and traading is still a problem) is working on an effective vaccine.
1
@John Fisher Flint water is free markets? Accidents happen; bad central planners -- the ultimate monopoly with actual coercive power over you -- abound.
Free markets are not perfect, but they correct themselves. You don't rich raising sick pigs.
4