South Korea has ordered hundreds of soldiers manning the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on its border with North Korea to track and capture wild boars in a bid to prevent the spread of African swine fever, military officials said.
South Korea confirmed its seventh case yesterday, just more than a week after the virus was first detected and prompted authorities to step up disinfection measures.
The source of the outbreak has not been confirmed, but the virus has been found on hog farms near the border with North Korea, which reported an outbreak in May to the world body in charge of fighting animal diseases.
Photo: AP
Troops and equipment normally used to guard against North Korean provocations were deployed over the summer to monitor and trap wild boars suspected of carrying the virus, a South Korean military official told reporters.
“We can’t shoot them, because it would be a violation of the armistice agreement,” the official said, referring to a 1953 pact with the North that halted fighting, but did not end the war and has governed the border ever since.
Decades after the 1950 to 1953 Korean War, the border is laced with land mines, razor wire and high-tech surveillance equipment. The 250km DMZ is also home to wild animals that thrive in the wooded no-man’s-land.
The animals might be deterred by fences and other barriers along the DMZ, the military official added.
The US-led United Nations Command (UNC), which helps oversee the DMZ, is not involved in containing the virus, the official said.
The UNC did not respond to a request for comment.
The efforts against the highly contagious disease, which is fatal to pigs, but does not affect humans, have taken on new urgency as more cases are reported.
Wild boars trapped by the military have tested negative for African swine fever, the military official said.
Two boars found dead in the DMZ had also tested negative, the South Korean Ministry of National Defense said.
South Korea has deployed 1,173 military personnel and 166 decontamination vehicles to seven areas, ministry deputy spokesman Roh Jae-cheon said.
“There have been no cases of wild boars crossing the border from North to South within the DMZ,” he told a news briefing. “No attempt was made to enter general outposts and no boars have been shot dead inside the DMZ.”
More than 300 South Korean soldiers and 40 decontamination trucks were yesterday deployed along roads and checkpoints near the border to control the spread of the virus, Roh said.
South Korea has been disinfecting people, vehicles and equipment at a liaison office jointly run with the North in the border city of Kaesong, said an official at the South Korean Ministry of Unification, which handles cross-border ties.
DMZ “peace trails” used by hikers have also been closed.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might