In Hogs We Trust - Part 111.

by Larry Powell 


(Warning, the words and images in this story are graphic.)

We all know that farm animals can get sick. But how many of us are aware of just how damaging animal epidemics can be - whether on the other side of the world or on our own doorstep? They can and do cause huge economic losses and harm to the health of animals and humans, alike. And, there’s ample evidence that, for generations, the model we’ve been using to raise animals in confined, crowded conditions, only magnifies the problems. So why is the Manitoba government  prepared to risk even more of the same by massively expanding pork production in a province with an already-large industry? I hope this part of my series will move you, the reader, to ask, “How much worse must things get, before we change course?” 

Losses suffered globally due to diseases of livestock, are staggering. As the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) notes, "Some of the most lethal bugs affecting humans originate in our domesticated animals. Thirteen of these (formally called “zoonotics”) are responsible for 2.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths per year. As more pigs and poultry are raised in concentrated spaces, especially in poorer countries, the risk of zoonotic disease rises. 

While the vast majority (of human casualties) are in low-and middle-income countries, the northeastern U.S. has emerged as a ‘hotspot,’ too!” Whatever the case, the authoritative Centers for Disease Contol in the States reminds us, we in developed countries, cannot afford to be complacent. On its website, the CDC proclaims, "We are living in an interconnected world where an outbreak of infectious disease is just a plane ride away." 

UPDATE: May 20, 2018:

It has recently been reported that the rare virus called Nipah has re-emerged in southern India, killing at least 11 people and causing more than 25 others to be hospitalized. Although global health officials consider this to be a relatively small outbreak, they’re worried. And while no cases have been reported in Canada, scientists with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have expressed similar concerns. 

Nipah is on the World Health Organization’s priority list of emerging diseases that could cause a global pandemic, alongside Zika and Ebola.

In 1999, Nipah claimed the lives of more than a hundred people in Malaysia and sickened almost 300 others. While fruit bats had probably been the initial carriers, the victims had all worked closely with pigs, which acted as intermediate hosts. To prevent the spread of the disease, more than a million hogs were euthanized, inflicting tremendous economic losses on the Malaysian economy.

Some of the diseases referred to here, including Nipah, have been known to infect those who take part in the Raaj, the largest annual religious pilgrimages in the world, where animals are sometimes sacrificed. 

While “zoonotics” have not been as common in Canada as elsewhere, the same cannot be said for diseases deadly to hogs - outbreaks which have proven - for much of North America - to be nothing short of rampant. 

In 2004, Canadian hog producers found themselves in the middle of a "major animal-health crisis, worldwide." A new variant of a disease called "Porcine CircoVirus-2 Associated Disease," (PCVAD), had infected Ontario’s swine herds with a vengeance. It seemed to closely resemble a strain that had been first identified in Saskatchewan 20 years earlier. And, not long before the Ontario outbreak, a similar kind disrupted pork production in parts of Asia and Europe, too. 

Lesions “of unprecedented severity” were inflaming the intestines, blood vessels, kidneys and spleen of Ontario herds. In some, fully half the pigs died. PCVAD had become “the dominant strain” infecting barns in both Ontario and Quebec. One study in the journal, “Veterinary Pathology” states, “In the space of less than two decades, this virus has gone from being a provincial oddity to one of the most economically important infectious agents in modern swine production.”

As the outbreak swept on to western Canada, animals were developing rasping coughs, diarrhea, pneumonia, fluid on the lungs, then dying. Within a few years, almost all of Canada’s pig farms had tested positive. As Ottawa put it at the time, “It severely affected the health and livelihood of the Canadian swine industry. Hundreds of producers faced financial ruin and pork processors laid off hundreds of staff. By 2009, the economic impact on the industry in North America had been estimated at more than $500m.” 

When it ended, PCVAD had claimed about 9% of this country’s swine herds. Based on a hog population of about 15 million at the time, we must have lost some 1.35 million animals. By 2007, the federal government had stepped in. At the request of producers, Ottawa gave them more than $62 million to help with the costs of an inoculation program. The government proclaimed, “The hog industry is (now) better prepared to face disease threats.”  

But, is it?

Last spring, another disease deadly to pigs moved into Manitoba, disrupting the industry to a degree perhaps not seen since the crisis 13 years earlier. Ominously dubbed “Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea” (PED), it infected hogs in scores of barns in southeastern Manitoba. Despite frantic efforts by barn owners and workers to control the infection, it had, by summer, found its way onto 90 farms. At this writing, 42 of those are now described as “PED-free,” once again. But these gains have come at a price. Industry sources confirm, during the struggle to contain the disease, it had become so rampant, and stress levels so high among workers trying to contain it, they were developing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. That’s what our veterans get in combat! There have been no new cases since October. So, is the worst behind us? Or is the epidemic just “in remissionIn another part of the world, the European Union, at this writing, was on high alert. After an absence of decades, a deadly viral disease called African Swine Fever (ASF) “re-invaded” three years ago. It is threatening both EU farm pigs and wild boar, who are believed to carry the disease. Despite heroic attempts by Lithuania, an EU country, to keep it at bay along its border with Belarus, the fever moved in. Then, it swept westward into Poland, the Czech Republic and three Baltic States.

  
A recent study by the University of Manitoba suggests, eradicating the disease won’t be easy. The virus can become airborne and spread on the wind for up to 18 kilometres. It can also withstand cold weather, be spread by livestock trucks, and survive for up to nine months in the earthen storage lagoons which producers use to store the waste. That waste, called slurry, is often spread on farm fields as a fertilizer. (An American expert even says, a single tablespoon may be potent enough to infect tens of millions of animals.) 

No hard numbers are publicly available on just how many pigs the outbreak has claimed. But an official said, at one point during the summer, almost a million were "under surveillance." She did not elaborate.




PED causes the animals to spew vomit from one end and diarrhea from the other. (See above.) While some adults can survive, almost all infected piglets become severely dehydrated and die on about their fifth day.
Infected herds must be culled. 
Photo credit - Science Magazine.

In Estonia, 22 thousand hogs had to be destroyed. Pork prices collapsed and more than a third of Estonia’s hog farms went out of business. The disease is now raising alarm in hog-producing countries like Denmark and Germany. With pork exports there worth billions, the stakes are high. That’s because any country where an infection is confirmed, might lose those markets. 

Below is a video depicting the seriousness of ASF, produced by the European Food Authority.

In a different part of the world, “Public Health England” (PHE), a government agency, has recently estimated that up to 200 thousand residents of England and Wales are being infected each year with Hepatitis E (HepE), mainly from eating undercooked meat, including pork. HepE is often not serious, but can sometimes cause liver failure in pregnant women and others with weakened immune systems. There are conflicting reports on the seriousness of some 60 cases over the summer, traced to imported pork products sold at a major London supermarket. PHE claimed the risk to the public was small, although newspaper accounts at the time, stated there had, indeed, been serious illnesses. The HepE strain responsible has been on the increase in the area since 2010. 

In 2001, a research team in this country concluded, “Hepatitis E is highly prevalent in commercial swine populations in Canada and…may be an important zoonotic agent for humans.” Those findings, however, have since been disputed, or at least played down. 

Officials here in Manitoba have, correctly, been informing the public that the PED virus (responsible for the current outbreak here), “is not a human health or food safety concern.” 

But research by experts at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech did note that PED is also a coronavirus. That’s a family of pathogens, other members of which are “known to infect humans and other animals and cause respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases.” The three PED strains they isolated, likely evolved from bats in China. This, they conclude, “provides further support of the... potential for cross-species transmission.”

The lead author of that study, Dr. X.J. Meng, in an interview with me, hotly denied any suggestion that PED might cross over into humans. 

So, while PED is not a “zoonotic,” the same cannot be said for other coronaviruses.

One of them, “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” (MERS), claimed human lives in dozens of countries in and around the Arabian Peninsula after being confirmed in 2012. Humans can get it by drinking unpasteurized camels’ milk.

And another coronavirus, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), took many lives in an epidemic in 2003, including 44 Canadians. Although the literature does not reveal any connection to hogs, much about the disease remains a mystery. These outbreaks (MERS and SARS), add the American researchers, “create further anxiety over the emergence of PED in the United States.” 

Early in 2009, the infamous “Swine flu” (H1N1) was first detected in Mexico.  By June of that year, the World Health Organization stopped counting cases and declared the outbreak a “pandemic.” When it was all over, human fatalities probably stood at about 285 thousand, mostly in Africa and southeast Asia. While the WHO still fears the disease may pose some threats in certain regions, it has declared it is now in a “post-pandemic period.”

Despite protests from hog producers and some politicians over the name, “Swine Flu” is not a misnomer. While it cannot be spread by eating pork, the virus contains five genes that normally circulate in pigs and is now considered a human influenza virus. Hogs infected with it were also found in three other countries, including Canada. And, yet another virus “of swine origin” was isolated in three people in Saskatchewan in 2010. All worked at the same large hog operation. 

So, are we taking livestock diseases seriously enough?

As the CDC cautions, "The more animals are kept in close quarters, the more likely it is that infection or bacteria can spread among them. Concentrated animal feeding operations or large industrial animal farms can cause a myriad of environmental and public health problemsAnd who will compensate for the huge economic losses which are sure to follow? Three guesses....

-30-

June 2nd, 2018,,,AN INDUSTRY UPDATE......

RELATED: "In Hogs We Trust."  

Part 1 - Antibiotic Overuse.

Part 11 - The Price we Pay for Corporate Hog$. 

Part 1V - The price we and our environment will pay for an expanded hog industry in Manitoba.

Part V - So what's behind Manitoba's crusade to rapidly expand industrial hog production. Click here and find out!

POSTSCRIPT: I have gleaned the above information from the most reliable sources I can find - government agencies, world health authorities, scientific research studies published in peer-reviewed journals and, in some cases, industry itself. But please consider this a “sampling,” rather than a complete chronicle. l.p. 

      Unlike "ILOs," animals on this family farm in Manitoba get to bask in the sun,breathe             fresh air and roam in spacious pastures. 
PinP photo.

Comments

PinP said…
"The incidence and range of many emerging diseases are influenced by the intensification of..livestock systems. Serious social and economic impacts can arise when diseases spread widely within human or animal populations, or when they spill over from animal reservoirs to human hosts. Most of the factors that contribute to disease emergence will continue, if not intensify. Integrating policies.. across the food chain can help reduce the spread of infectious diseases; robust detection, surveillance, monitoring, and response programs are critical." U.N. report - "Agriculture at a Crossroads" 2009
PinP said…
Don't you care? Then why not make a comment?
PinP said…
Clip-George Matheson-Manitoba Pork:
"We do ship a significant numbers of pigs south and a fair bit of pork comes into Canada from U.S. sources. From Manitoba we export a significant number of weanlings, probably in the range of three and a half million per year. Live pigs from the U.S. do not enter Canada. They have their own markets in their own country. They do export, 20 percent of the pork consumed by Canadians comes from U.S. origin." Spoken like a true "Free-Marketeer." No reference or apparent awareness of the reality of diseases that can and do sweep through North America herds. These people are operating with impunity, without fear of critical scrutiny from neo-liberal governments like Manitoba's and Canada's. (To Hell with regulations - let the markets rule!)
Delia Grace Randolph ILRI said…
Hi Larry,
The article, as far as I can tell, is factually correct.

The evidence seems quite clear that intensification, especially of pigs and poultry, is associated with emerging infectious zoonotic disease, foodborne disease, and antimicrobial resistant pathogens.

At the same time, smallholder systems in very poor countries, with weak health services, are mostly responsible for endemic (or day-to-day) zoonoses.

We have concern that intensification in developing countries may be even more risky than intensification in rich countries, because the environment is more suitable for disease and there is, on the whole, less governance and management of livestock.

Best,

Delia Grace Randolph | Program Leader (joint) Animal and Human Health
Flagship Leader Food Safety A4NH
International Livestock Research Institute | ilri.org
Box 30709, Nairobi, Kenya
Larry Powell said…
Pork producers are now worried about yet another disease that could devastate herds in the US. And they are "prepping" lawmakers there for the possibility of shelling out more public funds to counter the threat. COULD THE DISEASE COME TO CANADA? You be the judge. Below is a transcript of the pig industry's Canadian radio show, "Farmscape."

"Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Bank Needed As Precaution for FMD Outbreak
Farmscape for June 13, 2018
The President-Elect of the National Pork Producers Council says the creation of a Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Bank will help mitigate losses in the event of an FMD outbreak in the United States.
The National Pork Producer's Council HAS BEEN LOBBYING GOVERNMENT FOR FUNDING to create a Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Bank.
David Herring, the President Elect of the National Pork Producer's Council, told those on hand last week for World Pork Expo in Des Moines there's not enough vaccine available in the United States to accommodate a USDA policy change from using euthanasia to eradicate Foot and Mouth Disease in the event of an outbreak to one of using vaccination.
Clip-David Herring-National Pork Producer's Council:
Over the last 20 years we have gone from four or five percent exports to almost 25 or 26 percent exports.
If we would get a Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak here in the United States, overnight we would lose our export markets so what we're trying to do is a preventative tool to have in our box so maybe we could regionalize the outbreak and help open those export markets quicker.
Any way you cut it, if we get a Foot and Mouth outbreak in the States, it's going to be very expensive.
The markets will close automatically but it could happen in many different ways.
We could have a small regional outbreak and possibly mitigate the damages and help maybe keep some of the parts of the country open to exports but any given day in the United States we have anywhere from 350 to 400 thousand pigs on the road so we think it would be very hard to regionalize it so we need a volume in this vaccine bank so we can go and vaccinate and help mitigate the damages.
Herring right now there wouldn't be enough vaccine available to even vaccinate the pigs in the county in which he lives so creating a vaccine bank is an important precaution.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane."

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