When the deadly virus was first discovered in China, authorities told
the people in the know to keep quiet or else. Fearing reprisal from
Beijing, local officials failed to order tests to confirm outbreaks and
didn’t properly warn the public as the pathogen spread death around the
country.
All this happened long before China’s coronavirus outbreak, which has
claimed more than 3,000 lives worldwide in less than three months. For
the past 19 months, secrecy has hobbled the nation’s response to African
swine fever, an epidemic that has killed millions of pigs. A Reuters
examination has found that swine fever’s swift spread was made possible
by China’s systemic under-reporting of outbreaks. And even today,
bureaucratic secrecy and perverse policy incentives continue undermining
Chinese efforts to defeat one of the worst livestock epidemics in
modern history.
Beijing’s secretive early handling of the coronavirus epidemic has
troubling similarities to its missteps in containing African swine
fever, but with the far higher stakes of a human infection. After the
coronavirus was found in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei
province, local and national officials were slow to sound the alarm and
take actions disease experts say are needed to contain deadly outbreaks.
Beijing continues to gag negative news and online postings about the
disease, along with criticism of the government’s response.
With swine fever, Beijing set a tone of furtiveness across government
and industry by denying or downplaying the severity of a disease that
the meat industry estimates has shrunk China’s 440-million-hog herd by
more than half. The epidemic has taken a quarter of the world’s hogs off
the market, hurt livelihoods, caused meat prices to spike globally and
pushed food inflation to an eight-year high.
Cover-ups across China – coupled with underfinancing of relief for
devastated pig farmers and weak enforcement of restrictions on pork
transport and slaughter – have enabled the spread of the livestock virus
to the point where it now threatens pig farmers worldwide, according to
veterinarians, industry analysts and hog producers. Since the China
outbreak, African swine fever has broken out in 10 countries in Asia.
The vacuum of credible information has made it impossible for
farmers, industry and government to tell how and why the disease spread
so quickly, making preventive measures difficult, said Wayne Johnson, a
Beijing-based veterinarian who runs Enable Ag-Tech Consulting.
“To get it under control, you have to know where it is,” Johnson said.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement
to Reuters that it has repeatedly communicated to all regions the
importance of timely and accurate reporting of African swine fever
outbreaks and had zero tolerance for hiding and delaying the reporting
of cases.
Interviews with farmers, industry analysts and major suppliers to
China’s pork sector indicate otherwise. More than a dozen Chinese
farmers told Reuters they reported disease outbreaks to local
authorities that never made it into Beijing’s official statistics. Those
infections are going unreported to central authorities in part because
counties lack the cash to follow a separate requirement from Beijing to
compensate farmers for pigs killed to control the disease.
Local officials have also avoided reporting outbreaks out of fear of
the political consequences. And they have routinely refused to test pigs
for the virus when mass deaths are reported, according to interviews
with farmers and executives at corporate producers.
A farmer surnamed Zhao, who raises a herd in Henan province, said
local officials told him as much when they resisted recording the
outbreak he reported on his farm, which wiped out his herd.
“‘We haven’t had a single case of African swine fever. If I report
it, we have a case,’” Zhao recalled an official telling him. The local
officials could not be reached for comment and a fax seeking comment
went unanswered.
When the coronavirus hit, Chinese authorities reacted with a push to
reassure the public that all was well. The first reported death from the
virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, came on Jan. 9 – a 61-year-old man in
Wuhan. In the following days, Chinese authorities said that the virus
was under control and not widely transmissible.
The assurances came despite a lack of reliable data and testing
capacity in Wuhan. Testing kits for the disease were not distributed to
some of Wuhan’s hospitals until about Jan. 20, an official at the Hubei
Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Hubei CDC) told
Reuters. Before then, samples had to be sent to a laboratory in Beijing
for testing, a process that took three to five days to get results,
according to Wuhan health authorities.
During that gap, city hospitals reduced the number of people under
medical observation from 739 to 82, according to data from Wuhan health
authorities compiled by Reuters, and no new cases were reported inside
China.
China’s top leadership has dramatically ramped up the public-health
response since its early missteps. Beijing built new hospitals in days
to treat the sick and launched an unprecedented blockade of the disease
epicenter on Jan. 23, first quarantining Wuhan’s 11 million residents at
home, then suspending transport in all major cities of Hubei province,
home to about 60 million people.
Still, the initial attempts to tightly control information left many
people unaware of the risks and unable to take precautions that might
have prevented infection – and the suppressing of news and commentary
continues today. Wuhan authorities reprimanded eight people they accused
of spreading “illegal and false” information about the disease. One of
them, 34-year-old doctor Li Wenliang, later died from coronavirus,
triggering an angry backlash on social media.
Some critical posts were allowed during a brief and unusual period of
online openness in late January. But Beijing’s censors – the Cyberspace
Administration of China (CAC) – have since cracked down on posts about
Li and other information that authorities deem negative, according to
CAC censorship orders sent to online news outlets and seen by Reuters.
One CAC notice ordered online outlets to guard against “harmful
information.” Another ordered them not to “push any negative story.”
The CAC did not respond to a request for comment sent by fax.
UNREPORTED OUTBREAKS
Beijing had years to prepare for African swine fever. Veterinarians
have frequently warned Chinese authorities of the risks since the
disease started spreading through the Caucasus region in 2007.
Pigs infected by the virus initially suffer high fever, loss of
appetite and diarrhea. Then their skin turns red as internal
hemorrhaging starts and their organs swell, leading to death in as
little as a week.
With no vaccine or cure available for the disease, experts recommend
that infected pigs and others housed in the same barn are culled, with
the carcasses either burned or buried to prevent further infection.
Farms, equipment and vehicles that could be contaminated need to be
thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.
The first case in China was discovered on Aug. 1, 2018, on a farm
near Shenyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Just two weeks
later, the virus was found more than 1,000 kilometers to the south in
pigs bought by the country’s top pork processor, WH Group(
0288.HK),
from another northeastern province, Heilongjiang. It took Beijing
another two weeks to block pig exports from the whole region, and that
and other transport restrictions were poorly enforced, said Johnson and
other industry experts. WH Group declined to comment.
One factor behind the epidemic: Chinese consumers prefer fresh pork –
straight from the slaughterhouse, rather than chilled. This means
hundreds of thousands of live pigs are moved long distances every day to
supply processors in major cities. That mass movement spread the
disease relentlessly.
Over the first four months of the outbreak, Beijing reported
swine-fever cases almost daily as the virus spread from the northeast
down through central China, west into Sichuan, and to the huge province
of Guangdong by year-end. Veterinarians believe the virus spread quickly
because it can survive for weeks on dirty farm equipment or livestock
trucks.
And yet gaps in counting and tracking the pig disease have been
routine across China. Reuters found a striking absence of reported
outbreaks in some of the nation’s most productive pork regions.
For instance, almost none of the reported outbreaks have come from
the major hog-raising provinces of Hebei, Shandong and Henan. The three
contiguous northern provinces were the source of some 20% of the 700
million pigs China slaughtered in 2017. Many came from backyard farms,
which make up a large part of China’s industry and have proven fertile
breeding grounds for the disease. Yet each of the three provinces has
reported just a single case of African swine fever, despite widespread
anecdotal reports of outbreaks there that industry sources believe
killed millions of pigs.
Neither Shandong nor Henan authorities responded to requests for
comment. Hebei’s department of agriculture said it had “strictly
reported and verified the epidemic” and that the disease situation was
currently “stable.”
Six Henan farmers told Reuters they reported outbreaks during late
2018 and the first half of 2019. In some cases, local authorities helped
deal with dead pigs, they said, but never tested for the virus.
That’s what happened when Wang Shuxi, a farmer in Henan’s Gushi
County, lost more than 400 pigs in March 2019. Wang said he had no doubt
that his pigs had African swine fever, even though authorities never
tested them – and he couldn’t test them himself, because Beijing did not
permit the commercial sale of disease test kits at the time.
His pigs showed telltale symptoms of the disease.
“The whole body went red,” he said. He injected the animals with an
anti-fever medication to no avail. “At the start, they didn’t eat, and
even after injections, it kept returning,” he said. “If you can’t cure
it, you know it’s swine fever.”
Provincial and county governments had strong incentives to avoid
verifying and reporting outbreaks because of Beijing’s rules on
compensating farmers, said Huang Yanzhong, specialist in health
governance with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Under an African swine fever contingency plan drawn up in 2015,
Beijing ordered the culling of all pigs on farms where the disease is
found and on every farm within a three-kilometer radius. The central
government raised compensation from 800 yuan ($115) to 1,200 yuan for
every pig culled in 2018. Beijing typically promised to provide between
40% and 80% of the money, depending on the province. Localities would
fund the rest.
In April 2019, the national agriculture ministry said the central
government had allocated 630 million yuan to cull 1.01 million pigs to
contain the disease. But that money either wasn’t sufficient or
regularly did not get paid out, farmers told Reuters. None of about a
dozen farmers who told Reuters they tried to report outbreaks said they
had received the promised 1,200 yuan for each pig.
Many got nothing. Wang, the Gushi County farmer, said that almost a
year after his pigs died, he has received no recompense. Gushi County
officials could not be reached for comment.
Many farmers, eager to salvage value from their herds, have resorted
to sending their pigs to slaughter at the first sign of illness –
thereby thrusting the virus into the human food supply. The swine fever
virus does not threaten people. But its presence in meat – where it can
survive for weeks – creates a cycle of infection because many backyard
farmers feed pigs with restaurant scraps that include pork.
Garbage feeding caused 23 outbreaks in 2018, Huang Baoxu, deputy
director of the China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, told
reporters at a briefing in November that year. His remarks were a rare
instance where the central government revealed findings about the spread
of the hog virus. The center declined to comment for this story.
Farmers visiting slaughterhouses dealing in sick pigs also likely
picked up the virus on their trucks or equipment, spreading it back to
their farms, Johnson said.
In the southern province of Guangxi, the disease raged through the
spring of 2019 and early summer, several farmers told Reuters last year.
Bobai County was hit hard.
A Bobai farmer surnamed Huang said she lost almost 500 pigs during
April and May. She said she tried to report the diseased pigs to the
local government but was ignored. The official she spoke to by phone
never came to her farm. He told Huang that her pigs could not be saved –
but that they didn’t have African swine fever. His advice, she said:
“hurry and sell the pigs while they could be sold.”
Huang said she sold more than 30 pigs that she believed had the
virus. They looked healthy when she sold them, she said. Others sold
obviously sick pigs at very low prices. “Traders took all the pigs,
including the sick ones – as long as they could walk to the trucks,” she
said.
Huang buried her dead pigs daily for weeks on a relative’s land.
Others simply dumped their dead pigs on the roadside or in the
mountains, she said. The government provided no help.
Eventually, in late May, Bobai County reported one pig dead from the disease, official statistics show.
Authorities in Guangxi did not respond to a request for comment, and
officials in Bobai county’s agriculture bureau could not be reached.
Beijing’s agriculture ministry said in a statement that it had issued
an August 2019 order requiring punishments in situations where
localities failed to report outbreaks. The ministry said it meted out
unspecified discipline to more than 600 local personnel for what it
called failures to manage the disease that were uncovered in its
investigations of problem areas.
The practice of processing infected hogs has persisted despite new
rules from Beijing in July that required slaughterhouses to test all
batches of pigs for the virus. The agriculture ministry said in January
that 5% of the more than 2,000 samples taken from slaughterhouses in
November tested positive for the disease.
An Australian study in September found 48% of meat products
confiscated from Asian travelers arriving at its ports and airports
contained the virus.
“It showed there’s an awful lot of unrevealed infection not being
reported to the authorities,” said Trevor Drew, director of the
Australian Animal Health Laboratory.
One such information gap is at the top of the industry – China’s
large corporate pig producers. They have also been hit hard by the
disease, despite taking more extensive measures than backyard farms to
disinfect trucks and require workers to change clothes and shower before
and after shifts.
None of China’s top publicly traded producers have publicly announced
any swine fever outbreak, but executives of major hog producers
acknowledged in interviews with Reuters that their herds were hit by the
disease.
Thai conglomerate C.P. Pokphand(
0043.HK)
, one of China’s leading pig producers, has had swine-fever outbreaks
on farms in Liaoning, Shandong, Henan and Jiangsu provinces, Bai
Shanlin, chief executive of China operations, told Reuters in a rare
admission by a listed firm. Executives at three other listed companies,
also among China’s top pig producers, acknowledged outbreaks at several
farms but declined to be identified.
None of the outbreaks that these large companies have confirmed to
Reuters were reported by Beijing, according to a Reuters review of the
agriculture ministry’s data on outbreaks.
By August 2019, a year after the first case was found in China, pork
prices had passed a record set back in 2016. And they were still
climbing rapidly. With a crucial national celebration approaching in
October – the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic –
China’s top leaders took note. Pork is a staple of Chinese cuisine, and
rising meat production has been among the many signature achievements
in the Communist Party’s decades-long drive to bring prosperity to
China.
In a video conference that month with officials from all 34 provinces
and regions, Vice Premier Hu Chunhua issued a warning: Sufficient pork
was vital to people’s lives and the country’s stability. He called for
the urgent recovery of the herd as a key “political task.”
A raft of new production policies and incentives emerged from
Beijing. And as the provinces rallied to replenish the nation’s herd,
reports of African swine fever grew even more rare. Disease outbreaks
reported by the agriculture ministry have tailed off since August. In
January, Agriculture Minister Han Changfu said the situation has
stabilized.
The government’s statistics are rife with contradictions, however.
The ministry has reported 163 outbreaks of African swine fever since
August 2018 and said 1.19 million pigs have been culled, a fraction of
1% of China’s total herd. Separate ministry data tracking the herd
monthly show that, by September 2019, the herd had shrunk by 41% from
the prior year.
These official estimates of the decline are far too low, three major industry suppliers told Reuters.
“It’s at least 60%,” said Johan de Schepper, managing director of
Dutch feed ingredients firm Agrifirm International. His assessment,
based on sales to about 100 large pig producers, echoed those of others
in the industry.
The virus is still killing pigs nationwide and the herd may still be
shrinking, say farmers and industry suppliers. “Half of the herd was
gone before this winter, and I think half of the rest will be gone by
the end of the season,” said Johnson, the veterinarian, citing
conversations with clients from across China.
The problem: Some areas were hit with a second wave of the disease.
Henan province is among them, farmers told Reuters. Last year, about
60% of Henan’s herd was wiped out, mainly in the densely farmed areas in
the south and west of the province, analysts at Guotai Junan Securities
wrote in an internal memo seen by Reuters. Recently, the memo noted,
the virus has moved through east Henan, taking out another 20%.
The vicious disease ruined Zhao, the farmer in central China’s Henan
province. The virus struck in October, causing high fever, internal
bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea in his pigs. Just two survived. The
other 196 died in a week.
When Zhao tried to report the outbreak to the county veterinary
authority, he said, officials strongly encouraged him to keep quiet. A
local official reminded him of the national mandate to cull all pigs
within three kilometers of an infected farm. That could spell disaster
for his neighbors if Zhao spoke up.
“If it’s found to be African swine fever, people nearby will have to
stop raising pigs,” Zhao recalled a local official telling him. Zhao
decided against filing a report to protect his neighbors, he told
Reuters on a recent visit to his farm.
Further up the political hierarchy, the deputy governor of Henan
province was quoted by the provincial agriculture bureau as saying in
December that Henan had been free of the disease for 14 months, after a
single reported case in September 2018. The provincial government did
not respond to requests for comment.
The disinformation game continues. Zhao says that when county
officials came by his farm in January, they recorded that he still had
180 pigs. In fact, he said, he had just the two hogs that survived the
October outbreak.
“The country is being kept in the dark,” he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swinefever-china-epidemic-specialrepo/special-report-before-coronavirus-china-bungled-swine-epidemic-with-secrecy-idUSKBN20S189
