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PRC officials urge vigilance after pig disease outbreak

China's agriculture ministry said yesterday it had called on local governments to report all new cases of a disease that some industry officials estimate has wiped out as many as a million pigs in China in the last year.

The move follows an outbreak last month near Yunfu City in Guangdong Province that led to death of some 300 pigs.

The illness has been identified as a strain of blue ear disease, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

"It is the season for peak outbreaks. High temperature and humidity could cause even more outbreaks in the summer and autumn," the ministry said in a notice published on its Web site.

Officials have had difficulty determining how widespread the disease is because it had not been identified in earlier outbreaks and because of the disperse nature of China's pig industry, with many animals raised on small farms or by individual farmers.

The ministry has not said how many pigs have died from the disease since the first outbreak was reported a year ago in Jiangxi Province. But industry officials say the disease is now prevalent across the country, with estimates of pig deaths ranging from half a million to 1 million.

The disease, caused by a variation of the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome virus was first identified in the US in 1987, according to the Web site of the World Organization for Animal Health. It does not affect people, but the new strain has a higher mortality rate, said the ministry.

The ministry has successfully worked out a new type of vaccine against the disease and would speed up production to apply to pigs in some key suffering areas, it said. It did not elaborate.

The disease causes stillbirths in pigs, fever, loss of appetite, diarrhoea and redness of the skin. The ears of the affected pigs turn temporarily blue.

Mortality rates of as high as 50 percent had led farmers to abandon breeding and the reduction of the pig population has caused a heavy blow to the feed industry.
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