Farmscape for August 25, 2020

The Swine Health Information Center is paying close attention to efforts to repopulate breeding herds across China, Vietnam and southeast Asia and the implications of those efforts for the spread of African Swine Fever.
The Swine Health Information Center, as part of its August Newsletter, has released its monthly Global Swine Disease Monitoring Report.
SHIC Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says everyone continues to focus on the ASF situation and what stands out there.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
We continue to have ASF in Asia, in southeast Asia, in eastern Europe.
We're watching Poland and watching the virus move slowly although rather consistently from the east part of Poland into the western part and getting closer to Germany.
In Asia and southeast Asia, one of things that's happening is a repopulation of the breeding herds.
Across China, Vietnam, southeast Asia there's an effort to repopulate the breeding herds and we're looking at that as an opportunity for African Swine Fever to again have a second wave.
We'll watch and see how they are able to manage that.
Both China and Vietnam have upgraded biosecurity systems.
They've learned a lot of lessons from ASF and they've done a lot of upgrading on their biosecurity but there's still a long way to go so that repopulation is something we're going to keep a close eye on.

Dr. Sundberg notes, while a strain of ASF circulating in Nigeria is less virulent than the Georgia strain that is circulating everywhere else, it certainly doesn't decrease the risk of transmission.
He says the 2007 Georgia strain that came out of Africa up into the Baltic region was a highly virulent strain that was able to move throughout the world and there isn't any reason why we can't see the same thing happening with a less virulent stain so that is something that is being monitored closely.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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