The highly contagious African swine fever has reached Lower Saxony. The disease broke out in a farm with 280 sows and around 1,500 piglets in Emsbüren in the Emsland district. The national reference laboratory, the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, confirmed the findings of the State Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, as announced by the Ministry of Agriculture on Saturday in Hanover. According to the ministry, this is the first case in Lower Saxony, where there are a particularly large number of pig farms.
The animal disease was also detected in a pig farm in Brandenburg. Swine fever is harmless to humans and not contagious. “Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before swine fever reached Lower Saxony,” said Minister Barbara Otte-Kinast. “All experts have been warning about this for years,” said the CDU politician. The entire stock of the company should be killed on Sunday. The cause of the entry was initially unknown. A restricted zone with a total radius of ten kilometers was set up around the company.
The “pig system in Germany” is at an end
There are 296 pig farms in this area, where a total of around 195,000 pigs are kept. The exclusion zone also extends to areas of the adjacent district of Grafschaft Bentheim, where 70 farms with around 63,300 pigs are affected, according to the district. Arable farming is left out because the case occurred in the barn and no wild boars were affected.
Greenpeace called for a rethinking of attitude: mass culling showed that the existing “pig system in Germany” was structurally, economically and ethically at an end. The massive concentration of too many animals in a small space “not only brings with it enormous animal welfare and environmental problems,” wrote agricultural expert Martin Hofstetter. Animal diseases could spread particularly quickly.