Wall Street Journal Article Questions Chinese Pig Deaths

August 22, 2007 — 

A recent Wall Street Journal article raises questions regarding what's really going on in the Chinese swine herd.

The article discusses a paper entitled Emergence of Fatal PRRSV Variants: Unparalleled Outbreaks of Atypical PRRS in China and Molecular Dissection of the Unique Hallmark published by Chinese researchers implicating a variant strain of PRRS virus as the culprit in the disease outbreak. The paper examines an outbreak last summer that infected more than 2 million pigs, killing about 400,000. Other experts are not so convinced that PRRS is the sole etiology however.

Chinese scientists involved with the research say they have been forthcoming. "There is nothing secret," says George F. Gao, director general of the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and one of the authors of the Chinese paper. Dr. Gao says that, if anything, the government has been pressuring the Chinese researchers to release the information they had.

Fear that the disease may have already spread to Vietnam, officials there requested diagnostic help from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The FAO and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) have sent a team of experts to Vietnam to investigate.

[Ed. Note: As a reminder, Dr. Steven McOrist recently visited China and provided AASV with some pictures he took of pigs and lesions he observed during his visit. The photos are available in the AASV Image Library in the members only section of our website.]

Source: Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2007