China’s Pig Pandemic Should Worry Everyone
What's up with the title? I could understand for something like SARS, but African swine fever only affects pigs.
What's up with the title? I could understand for something like SARS, but African swine fever only affects pigs.
While the outbreak may not be as immediately dangerous to humans as SARS, the official response should worry Chinese, as well as public health authorities globally. Thanks to its geographic position on migratory bird routes, its vast and largely unregulated livestock industry, and its weak public health institutions, China is a prime candidate to serve as the incubator for the next pandemic capable of killing millions of humans. Ensuring that Beijing responds to that epidemic in a responsible manner must be a global priority.
China expends enormous resources to maintain its country (arguably, it's more efficient as 3 or 4 separate countries), and a jump in the cost of food would disrupt that delicate balance.
The prediction is that 30% of China's pig herd will die. Pork is their staple protein and if 30% of their supply disappears the price will go through the roof and then it will be almost impossible to deny on Chinese media that there's an out-of-control epidemic and the government isn't prepared to do anything about it.
China does have large stores of Corn and Soybeans, which they can feed to pigs. Grain stores fairly well once you dry it, no need for expensive refrigeration. Quality goes down over time, but you can still get several years. Since most of this is feed to animals quality loss is not as big a deal (poison of a few animals is an economic issue - moral concerns can be hid from consumers much easier)
Making up the difference between freezing and the ambient temperature requires constant energy.
China has access to a lot of land where the mean average temperature gets close to or below freezing[1], they've also got access to permafrost[2] areas.
Whether they have long-term strategic stockpiles of meat is another matter, but I don't see why running such a stockpile wouldn't be relatively cheap for them given their access to cold areas. Once you decide to store meat long enough it makes sense to put it on a train to Tibet instead of paying to keep it in a freezer in the heat by the coast.
1. https://www.topchinatravel.com/china-map/average-annual-temp... 2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-permafro...
In the event of a major war or other event that causes supply problems you need to provide people with their basic food needs. Doing that with canned goods or even protein bars/powder to the extent that a balanced diet requires some amount of protein is much more cost-effective and reliable.
Similarly you'd stock up on something like canned lentils or chickpeas if you're worried about the carbohydrate supply, not stock up on frozen bread.
But China might enact such a policy of stocking up on luxury goods since they're continually paranoid that their dictatorship is balanced on the knife-edge of "don't mind the totalitarianism as long as the trains run on time".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Hypotheses_about_t...
The key takeaway is the slow and ineffective response from Chinese authorities at tackling the spread of African Swine Fever. China's response to SARS attracted a lot of criticism and the swine fever epidemic has shown that a lot of the flaws haven't been fully fixed. This paves the way for a future epidemic that may infect humans. It is somewhat alarmist but also very valid concern.
An infectious disease that doesn't impact humans can be just as destructive on our society by destroying economically important livestock or crops.
- mutation of an existing pathogen affecting humans - mutation of an existing animal pathogen so that it can start infecting humans
The first is more likely with inadequate treatment and lack of containment, the latter is more likely if there's more exposure of humans to the animal virus. With 130 million pigs infected with this disease there's quite a lot of exposure.
Reassortment in swine is a primary mechanism for how the influenza virus mutates so often, making it a moving target for vaccines.