Introduction of African Swine Fever into the European Union through Illegal Importation of Pork and Pork Products

Abstract

Transboundary animal diseases can have very severe socio-economic impacts when introduced into new regions. The history of disease incursions into the European Union suggests that initial outbreaks were often initiated by illegal importation of meat and derived products. The European Union would benefit from decision-support tools to evaluate the risk of disease introduction caused by illegal imports in order to inform its surveillance strategy. However, due to the difficulty in quantifying illegal movements of animal products, very few studies of this type have been conducted. Using African swine fever as an example, this work presents a novel risk assessment framework for disease introduction into the European Union through illegal importation of meat and products. It uses a semi-quantitative approach based on factors that likely influence the likelihood of release of contaminated smuggled meat and products, and subsequent exposure of the susceptible population. The results suggest that the European Union is at non-negligible risk of African swine fever introduction through illegal importation of pork and products. On a relative risk scale with six categories from negligible to very high, five European Union countries were estimated at high (France, Germany, Italy and United Kingdom) or moderate (Spain) risk of African swine fever release, five countries were at high risk of exposure if African swine fever were released (France, Italy, Poland, Romania and Spain) and ten countries had a moderate exposure risk (Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Sweden and United Kingdom). The approach presented here and results obtained for African swine fever provide a basis for the enhancement of risk-based surveillance systems and disease prevention programmes in the European Union.

Risk assessment of African swine fever in the south‐eastern countries of Europe

“…() highlight the relationship between societal factors, such as poverty and corruption, and vulnerability to infectious disease. Further, compliance with the legal requirements laid down by veterinary authorities (VAs) is central to the success of control and eradication efforts, including ASF (Costard et al., ; Gogin et al., ; Sánchez‐Vizcaíno et al., ; Martínez‐López et al., ; Mur et al., ).With respect to ASF, a series of studies have highlighted the contribution of socioeconomic factors to the maintenance of ASF in Sardinia (Mur et al., ; Cappai et al., ; Loi et al., ). The risk of ASF maintenance was increased in municipalities with higher levels of human deprivation (defined as a lack of goods, services, amenities and physical environment), reduced educational levels and low employment (Cappai et al., ; Loi et al., ).…”

An Update on the Epidemiology and Pathology of African Swine Fever

“…Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Haiti). ASF has been eradicated from all of these countries except from the Italian island of Sardinia, which has been affected since 1978 (S anchez-Vizca ıno and Arias, 2012;Costard et al, 2013a, b). ASF has also continued to spread on the African continent and reached West African countries and some islands that were previously free of the disease.…”

“…Consequently, prevention is based on avoiding introduction of the disease. Several routes of entry and risk assessments have been described for different EU countries (Mur et al, 2012a(Mur et al, , b, 2014Costard et al, 2013a;De la Torre et al, in press). The main control measures are to monitor the entry of pigs and pig products and to forbid the use of food waste for feeding pigs.…”

The Influence of Temperature on the Russian Isolate of African Swine Fever Virus in Pork Products and Feed With Extrapolation to Natural Conditions

“…Recent publications have discussed the risk of ASFV introduction when importing pigs [10]. Illegal pork trade and the use of food waste in the animals feeding are recognized the most significant anthropogenic factors of the ASFV dissemination [20][21][22]. Moreover, a large number of private farms with their low bi-osafety level poses additional risks of the disease occurrence and dissemination Previously, Spanish researchers showed that ASFV could persist for several weeks or months in the frozen [23], freshly prepared or raw, as well as salted dried meat [24,25], which was in line with our findings When extrapolating our findings on natural and agricultural objects, it should be focused on the need to observe basic sanitary rules, given the fact that the virus can remain virulent for more than 2 weeks under favorable environment.…”