Germany on alert as swine fever nears border

Germany is deploying a full array of defences to stop boars from bringing swine fever into the country and avert a disaster for its thriving pork industry.

Among the measures along the border are sniffer dogs, drones and electrified fences.

German farmers first began to worry when swine fever was identified at a pig farm in western Poland in November. But it was the discovery of a boar with the fever near the town of Nowogrod Bobrzanski — just 40 kilometres from the German border — that really raised the alarm. Fears that a spread to Germany may be inevitable, Denmark is already putting up a fence along its own 70-kilometre border.

“The question is no longer if swine fever will come to Germany but when,” Torsten Reinwald, a spokesman for Germany’s hunting federation, told AFP.

The virus is not harmful to human health but can cause deadly bleeding in domestic pigs and boars.

The only way of getting rid of it is through mass culling at farms — a nightmare for German farmers.

Half of Germany’s pork production of five million tons a year goes to foreign markets, making it Europe’s biggest exporter of the meat.

Via France 24