Panic in Spain as virus outbreak declared a national emergency | World | News
Spanish authorities were forced to declare a national emergency after 13 cases of swine flu were detected, threatening the country’s valuable pork exports. The disease, which causes fatal internal bleeding in animals, was also confirmed in wild boars in Spain during the last flu season, leading to fears that the disease would spread to other animals.
Experts have been deployed to 39 pig farms in a 12-mile area around the site of the first outbreak in Catalonia, and a high-security laboratory is reportedly being blamed on the Center for Research in Animal Health (CReSA) in the Bellaterra region of the province of Barcelona.
Although authorities have yet to find signs of the disease in other animals, El País newspaper reported that a wild boar died of the disease in late November, just a few hundred meters from the center where the virus was being studied. The Spanish newspaper contacted CReSA to ask whether the construction might weaken safety protocols, but did not receive a response.
Catalonia regional president Salvador Illa said on Saturday (December 6) that he had ordered the autonomous community’s agri-food research institute to carry out inspections at unnamed facilities.
He said: “The regional government does not rule out any possibilities regarding the origin of the African swine fever outbreak, but does not confirm any. All hypotheses remain open. First of all, we need to know what happened.”
It was not determined how swine fever reached the Barcelona area. However, one of the scenarios put forward by the Ministry of Agriculture is that the virus was transmitted through foreign food thrown away and consumed by wild pigs.
Genetic analysis has shown that the swine fever strain is different from those currently recorded in other European countries. This is more similar to the one recorded in Georgia in 2007. CreSA scientists are collaborating with similar strains provided by the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom.
A spokesman for Spain’s agriculture ministry said: “The discovery of a virus similar to the one circulating in Georgia does not therefore exclude the possibility that its origin lies in a biological containment facility.”
Spanish authorities have moved urgently to protect the country’s valuable pork exports, which generate €8.8bn (£7.7bn) in annual revenue.
Swine flu (H1N1) is a type of viral infection that affects the respiratory system. There is no known vaccine or treatment for the virus. In 2009, an epidemic first detected in the United States affected millions of people worldwide. At least 150,000 people have died worldwide because, unlike older people, they have no immunity to the new H1N1 strain; 80% of them were under 65 years of age. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the epidemic over in August 2010.
But people can still get and spread H1N1. It is one of the seasonal flu viruses and can cause illness, hospitalization, and death. A six-year-old girl who caught swine flu in 2012 died in what doctors described as a “one in a million” incident. Chloe Buckley, from West Drayton, died at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington in July, 48 hours after complaining of a sore throat. An autopsy showed that he died of septic shock as a result of a tonsillitis infection. But the pathologist could not rule out swine flu as a contributing factor.
