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How diseases cross borders can be a dark mystery. It’s never been clear, for instance, just how West Nile virus arrived in the United States in 1999. Researchers think they know why clusters of malaria cases occur around international airports, but no one has proved the hypothesis by catching an infected mosquito as it flies out of a plane’s cargo compartment.
So when piglets started dying in droves in the summer of 2013, from a rapidly spreading disease called porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) that had never been seen in the United States before, animal health experts were baffled. In a frantic search for the source, epidemiologists investigated whether the pathogen had escaped from a laboratory, or been carried by migrating birds, or lurked in frozen semen taken from hogs in other countries. Was pig feed contaminated? Were feral swine carrying it? The virus was closely related to one found in China, and many of the ingredients in pig feed come from there. But the Chinese meat firm Shanghui was in the midst of buying Smithfield Foods.
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Two years later, after exhaustive studies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Inspection Service says it has identified the vehicle that carried the virus across the world. The culprit was something so humble, it was easy to overlook: the giant woven bags that are used to transport feed ingredients across oceans, and then reused in the United States to carry mixed feed between feed mills and onto farms.
Read full, original post: Deadly Pig Virus May Have Sneaked Into US On Reusable Bags
