SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the Ms.-Piggy-could-not-be-reached-for-comment dept.
African Swine Fever is Spreading Fast and Eliminating it Will Take Decades:
The deadly pig virus that jumped from Africa to Europe is now ravaging China's $128 billion pork industry and spreading to other Asian countries, an unprecedented disaster that has prompted Beijing to slaughter millions of pigs. But stopping African swine fever isn't so easy.
The virus that causes the hemorrhagic disease is highly virulent and tenacious, and spreads in multiple ways. There's no safe and effective vaccine to prevent infection, nor anything to treat it. The widespread presence in China means it's now being amplified across a country with 440 million pigs—half the planet's total—with vast trading networks, permeable land borders and farms with little or no ability to stop animal diseases.
The number of pigs China will fatten this year is predicted to fall by 134 million, or 20%, from 2018—the worst annual slump since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began counting China's pigs in the mid-1970s. While the pig virus doesn't harm humans even if they eat tainted pork, the fatality rate in pigs means it could destroy the region's pork industry.
Spain's experience with the disease suggests that a cull alone won't be enough to solve the problem. The country implemented strict sanitary measures and industrialized its hog production system but it took 35 years and help from the European Union before the disease was eradicated in 1995. The Italian island of Sardinia has been trying unsuccessfully to get rid of the virus for four decades, and its hog population is a fraction of China's.
Infected animals are contagious before showing symptoms. It can be transmitted through excrement that then gets washed into waterways by storm runoff. It's extremely contagious --even minute quantities of the virus can contaminate drinking water from a river or stream. Direct contact with an infected pig, contaminated clothing, equipment, or facilities is sufficient. There's no effective vaccine or treatment.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday June 07 2019, @01:03AM (3 children)
A hero shall emerge [qz.com]. Here's hoping.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday June 07 2019, @02:45AM (2 children)
Aids, Ebola, Ob... African Swine Fever: Thanks, Africa!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @10:07AM (1 child)
And the worst of the lot... The HUMANS! Bah! It even sounds diseased. "Boss, I'm sorry. I can't come to work today... I've got the HUMIES."... Horrible place this Africa... Awful.
A shiny copper Internets for the first nerd to link the source.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday June 07 2019, @10:53PM
Only played the game once at a friend's so I can't be sure but I think it was a random NPC mob Orc ambient monologue in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday June 07 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)
So let me see if I have this curly:
Which of these scenarios are you saying is the best choice for me?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @02:16AM
The second one. There your chances of dying a painless death is at least greater than zero. Even if it wasn't painless, it would at least be fast, as opposed to slowly bleeding to death of internal hemorrhages until you have enough aneurysms that you lose consciousness due to the brain damage.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @01:47AM
since the 1960s till now.
"These vaccines are not used anymore mainly due to safety problems derived from their inherent infectious nature" https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/5/4/35/htm [mdpi.com]
As if "industrializing hog production system" was the serendipitous outcome.
Right now, a new live vaccine has been developed again:
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-vaccine-african-swine-fever-bacon.html [phys.org]
Remains to be seen if it be swept under the rug again while media fearmongering marches on. Maybe not, because the Chinese are developing their own, too:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01269-5 [nature.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @02:04AM (5 children)
The age of the average american farmer is 60, give or take a year or so.
The supply of american agricultural (large animal and poultry) veterinarians is reducing.
Americans don't want (as a nation) to go into agricultural labour, and international migrants (your buddies Juan and Miguel) are being kept out or driven off (in before the Resist crowd: this has been going on since long before 2016).
States are piling in on top of the feds to add complex, burdensome and frequently changing regulations to what is already a capital-heavy, low-returns business.
Activists who don't, and generally don't want to understand the business, are using feel-good stories inside suburbia to lobby for laws that hamstring agriculture even more.
But don't worry, folks. We got this. It's all good. Food grows in styrofoam, under cellophane, after all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Friday June 07 2019, @02:51AM (2 children)
All those things you're complaining about are industry problems.
Meanwhile: An awful lot of farms are not even businesses. [agriculture.com]
Less than $10,000 in sales? That's a hobby. Less than $100,000? That's not going to make you any profit unless you're being subsidised by taxpayers, and guess what?
It's the big guys raking it in. [forbes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @03:10PM (1 child)
It's not as simple as all that. Many farms have products that don't sell year-over-year. If you go to the average tree farm, you'll find low or no sales for years on end, and then sudden, large sales as sections get logged. You also have farms dealing in things like stud breeding, where sales are very high dollar, but irregular. Granted, there are lots of small-to-hobby farms, but those are actually part of a healthy industry in which hobbyists can participate, and often become a reservoir for off-beat genetic options, or a laboratory for techniques. Measuring them just on a simple sales (or even sales/acre) scale is misleading.
And as for the misplaced subsidies, that comes under the heading of regulatory problems. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out that the big boys have the ability to hire someone whose only job is paperwork.
Example: you want to keep a few cute little nigerian dwarf goats? Good for you. The government wants you to be in the Scrapie programme. You get inspections (whether you want them or not), and eartags (ditto), paid for. However, the value of that subsidy is under $1K/year, for no real benefit that you probably care about. On the other hand, if you have three hundred head of goats, and you sell meat and hides and maybe hair or milk (depending on the goat breed) that's a lot more subsidy coming your way, for substantially higher value because of ex/import regulations.
There's another factor: many farms with low sales actually sell a lot of stuff. The wholesale price of hay, for example, is not high. It fluctuates quite a bit, and in fact the same could be said for many commodities. $10K of grass hay can easily be thousands of bales. By the time you're baling and trucking that much, it's not just a hobby any more.
The numbers are not the whole story.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday June 09 2019, @07:16AM
It doesn't matter how long it takes or how hard you work. $10,000 per year is not a living.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday June 07 2019, @03:01AM
Food grows in styrofoam, under cellophane, after all.
Kinda [scienceline.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 07 2019, @02:20PM
That's really part of a long process of agribusiness driving family farms under. If you're from parts of the world where agriculture is practiced the names "Monsanto" and "Archer Daniel Midland" send shivers up your spine. I bet most people on this board have no idea who they are or what they have been getting up to, such that all of this is doubly theoretical.
Culls happen. They have happened before, and they will happen again. There was a cull for Mad Cow Disease. There was a cull for Bird Flu. There was a cull for bucellosis. Millions of animals were destroyed. Yet here we are, with people still buying all kinds of meat and throwing it on the BBQ.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @03:31AM (3 children)
Got love disease names that implicate a country, even if disease didn't originate there:
Spanish itch
French curse
Canton rash
Spanish flu
German measels
Japanese encephalitis
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @03:50AM (1 child)
'murikan moron
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @04:02AM
Greek cunt
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 07 2019, @02:22PM
...
Google
Microsoft
Apple
Facebook
Twitter...
What, you didn't specify what kind of disease!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @03:39AM (2 children)
"Infected animals are contagious before showing symptoms. It can be transmitted through excrement."
So sterilize the pig shit.
The Chinese are already big on recycling night soil. Just add sterilization to the sequence. Done.
Only Americans are stupid enough to create fucking lakes of pig shit. Look it up if you don't believe me.
~childo
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @03:52AM
No living at the bottom of such a lake, looking up doesn't show any.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 07 2019, @02:23PM
The dumbest thing about lakes of pig shit is that they're wasting the lakes of pig shit. They could be harvesting methane from it, then sterilizing it and selling it as organic fertilizer to the farmers.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @11:00AM (5 children)
Most ridiculous part of this news is the fact
How did they do the counting? CIA sending some field agents to countryside China? I can't stop laughing...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @11:42AM (1 child)
You look at data coming out of slaughter houses, auction houses and other places. This is a statistical problem, not a "counting" problem. I know, difficult to understand for the uninitiated, but it gets rather more accurate the larger numbers involved. Kind of like climate vs. weather problem... not sure if you understand that one either.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/20/5825826/these-maps-show-where-all-the-worlds-cattle-chickens-and-pigs-live [vox.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 07 2019, @02:27PM
One cannot trust numbers reported by the Chinese government. During the Great Leap Forward they got into the habit of counting logs going into the sawmill, running them through un-sawed, and taking them back around front to count them again so they could make their quotas.
No, the parent was correct: the CIA would have to send agents to the Chinese farms to count by hand to get a more accurate number. Except, the CIA is not competent enough to do that. But somebody would have to do it firsthand.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 07 2019, @07:45PM (2 children)
Or via satellite.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @03:43PM (1 child)
Using ai to count objects in the sat pics?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 08 2019, @04:07PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @03:12PM
Wonder how this will affect the trade war, does China now remove the tariffs on US pork or just tough it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @04:57PM
but but but ... mass slaughter / culling will also annihilate the anti-patient zero ...
one aspect not mentioned at all (?) in the massive mono-culture pig meat factory experiment is that it
could also be looked at as breeding the most resistive pig in the world: the super-pig, immune against everything ... except a hungry human ^_^
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @10:33AM
watching from afar their dearest enemies next to the jews are destroyed by the millions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @09:13PM
these culls piss me off. learn how to do your fucking jobs right.