African Swine Fever Is Spreading Fast and Eliminating It Will Take Decades
6th June 2019
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.
Let’s see: It ‘jumped from Africa to Europe’ but the worry is about China’s pork industry? That’s a bigger jump than from Africa to Europe. Pardon me if I don’t seem concerned about China’s pork industry.
If we know anything about disease pandemics, it’s that not every victim will die. (Check the history of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.) If China has 440 million pigs, a significant portion of them will prove resistant. Once all of the vulnerable pigs die off, China will use the resistant pigs to rebuild their port industry. Sucks to be China, of course, but it’s not the end of the world, or even the end of the pigs.
This is the kind of hair-on-fire ‘journalism’ that gives news organs like Bloomberg a bad name.