MOA and FAO China Office jointly held the African Swine Fever Technical Cooperation Program (ASF-TCP) Initiation Meeting in Beijing on July 4, 2014. The two sides discussed ways to push forward China's campaign of ASF prevention & control.
Mr. Wang Gongmin, Deputy Director-General of Veterinary Bureau of MOA, and Mr. Percy Misika, FAO Representative in China attended the meeting and delivered speeches.
African swine fever (ASF) is classified as a notifiable disease by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) Terrestrial Animal Health Code. It is a devastating haemorrhagic fever of pigs with mortality rates approaching 100 percent. It causes major economic losses, threatens food security and limits pig production in affected countries.
It seems that over recent years, ASF has rapidly spread over long distances from the traditional epidemic areas in Africa to the eastern hemisphere. Outbreaks were constantly reported in Russia and some other neighboring regions of China, putting at risk large pig populations in the border areas.
In order to reduce the risk of ASF and facilitate the effective emergency response of China, MOA and FAO launched the ASF-TCP and specified the following objectives: to make better use of FAO technological and expert resources and build up a mechanism of joint prevention & control with neighboring countries; to strengthen the research on and reserves of laboratory diagnosis technologies; to improve anti-ASF technical norms and contingency plans; and to enhance China's comprehensive capacity of animal disease prevention & control.
Participants to the meeting included representatives of FAO Emergency Center for Transboundary Animal Diseases Operations (FAO-ECTAD) China Office, Department of International Cooperation of MOA, China Animal Disease Control Center, China Institute of Veterinary Drugs Control and China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, as well as experts from Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Hunan, and so on.