African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will Take Decades

Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by burfog on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:58AM (#20111711)

Food animals don't get the option to travel around town at will. There should be no possible way for the disease to spread.

The fact that the disease does spread means that farms are failing to provide biohazard isolation.

We can see a similar problem with chickens. We actually give vaccines to chickens. The vaccines would be pointless if the chickens were properly isolated from contamination. Viruses do not spontaneously form from chickens or from non-living matter.

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Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by onion2k on Thursday June 06, 2019 @02:06AM (#20112010)

Disease can be spread by more ways than simple food-animal-to-food-animal contact. For example, bovine TB kills cows but doesn't kill badgers, so a badger can spread it between herds. You can't stop that by isolating the cows.

There was a very controversial cull of badgers here in an attempt to stop it but even that didn't work.

Disease management is hard.

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Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by burfog on Thursday June 06, 2019 @02:20AM (#20112058)

You stop that by isolating the cows from badgers and any other wildlife. Workers and their clothing and tools get cleaned when entering and leaving the facility.

The only thing hard about disease management is the competitive race to the bottom. Skimping on disease management means you don't have to train the workers, don't have to spend money on bleach, and don't have to repair holes in the walls. Maybe you don't even bother with walls.

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Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by onion2k on Thursday June 06, 2019 @02:39AM (#20112139)

You stop that by isolating the cows from badgers and any other wildlife.

Beyond raising cattle in a hermetically-sealed shed that is effectively impossible,and definitely beyond the bounds of any sort of economic reasoning.

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Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by zwaps on Thursday June 06, 2019 @02:25AM (#20112072)

Clashes a bit with the idea of happy cows grazing on alpine pastures this

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Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by ohiovr on Thursday June 06, 2019 @08:04AM (#20113668)

One attack vector of the disease is transmission through tick bites. Ticks then bite boars. Swine fever also takes enough time to begin acting that a herd can become infected without there being any signs till it is too late to mitigate. Swine fever can also be transmitted by feed but it isn’t clear to me how that works. Sometimes pigs are fed to pigs but I don’t see how that would lead to a supply feed infection.

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Re:African Swine Fever Is Spreading and Eliminating It Will ... by taneq on Thursday June 06, 2019 @02:22AM (#20112064)

> Viruses do not spontaneously form from chickens or from non-living matter.

Well, they kind of do (albeit at a very low rate). Where else did the first ones come from?

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