China
Thousands of dead pigs found in Shanghai river
Next video: March 11, 2013 - Telegraph correspondent Tom Phillips reports on China's latest health scandal from the foul smelling banks of the Huangpu river in Shanghai where over 3,000 dead pigs have been pulled from the water.
Authorities have been pulling out the swollen and rotting pigs, some with their internal organs visible, since Friday - and revolting images of the carcasses in news reports and online blogs have raised public anger against local officials.
The surge in the dumping of dead pigs upstream from Shanghai has followed a police campaign to curb the illicit trade in sick pig parts.
The effort to keep infected pork off dinner tables may instead be fueling new health fears, as Shanghai residents and local media fret over the possibility of contamination to the city's water supply, although authorities say no contamination has been detected.
The following article was originally published at The Daily Mail on March 11, 2013
China's bay of pigs: Shanghai residents horrified after 3,000 'infected' corpses are found in river
China's bay of pigs: Shanghai residents horrified after 3,000 'infected' corpses are found in river
- Swollen bodies of the pigs have been pulled from the waters
- Comes after crackdown on illicit trade in infected meat
- Shanghai residents concerned over possibility of contamination to water
- Authorities say none has so far been detected
A dead pig floats on the river. The discovery of more than 3,000 carcasses has followed a police campaign
to curb the illicit trade in sick pig parts
to curb the illicit trade in sick pig parts
The rotting carcasses of almost 3,000 'diseased' pigs have been found floating upstream in Shanghai, following a police campaign to curb an illicit trade in infected meat.
The swollen and distended animals - some of which had their internal organs visible - have been pulled from the waters since Friday by China's authorities.
It has caused concern amongst Shanghai residents and local media over the possibility of contamination to the city's water supply, though authorities say none has so far been detected.
Revolting images of the carcasses in news reports and online blogs have caused a local outcry against officials.
The swollen and distended animals - some of which had their internal organs visible - have been pulled from the waters since Friday by China's authorities.
It has caused concern amongst Shanghai residents and local media over the possibility of contamination to the city's water supply, though authorities say none has so far been detected.
Revolting images of the carcasses in news reports and online blogs have caused a local outcry against officials.
Lawyer Gan Yuanchun said on his microblog: 'Well, since there supposedly is no problem in drinking this water, please forward this message, if you agree, to ask Shanghai's party secretary, mayor and water authority leaders if they will be the first ones to drink this meat soup?'
On Monday, Shanghai officials said the number of dumped adult and piglet carcasses retrieved had reached 2,813.
The city government, citing monitoring authorities, said the drinking water quality has not been affected.
Shanghai's Agriculture Committee said authorities do not know what caused the pigs to die, but that they have detected a sometimes-fatal pig disease in at least one of the carcasses.
The disease is associated with the porcine circovirus, which is widespread in pigs but doesn't affect humans or other livestock.
The dumping follows a clampdown on the illegal trade in contaminated pork.
In China, pigs that have died from disease should be either incinerated or buried, but some unscrupulous farmers and animal control officials have sold problematic carcasses to slaughterhouses.
Shanghai's city government said initial investigations had found the dead pigs had come from Jiaxing city in neighboring Zhejiang province. It said it had not found any major epidemic.
Huang Beibei, a lifetime resident of Shanghai, was the first to expose the problem when he took photos of the carcasses and uploaded them onto his microblog on Thursday.
'This is the water we are drinking,' Huang wrote. 'What is the government doing to address this?'
His graphic photos apparently caught the attention of local reporters, who followed up.
Huang said he's most concerned about water safety. 'Though the government says the water is safe, at least I do not believe it - given the number of the pigs in the river. These pigs have died from disease,' Huang said.
The pork harvested from diseased carcasses has ended up in markets in the past.
As a food safety problem, it has drawn attention from China's Ministry of Public Security, which has made it a priority to crack down on gangs that buy dead diseased pigs and process them for illegal profits.
Zhejiang police said on their official website that police have been campaigning to rid the market of unsafe pork meat and that the efforts were stepped up this winter as Chinese families gathered to celebrate the Lunar New Year in February.
BBC Asia reported:
Workers in China are continuing to collect dead pigs from a river near Shanghai, with more than 2,000 carcasses reportedly recovered so far.
Officials say they have to act quickly to remove the pigs, as the Huangpu River is a major source of drinking water for the city.
They are investigating the cause of the deaths and suspect the pigs were dumped by farms upriver.
Bloggers have criticised what some see as a slow government response.
Workers aboard boats are using long-handled rakes to pull out the bloated carcasses, which started appearing in the river on Thursday, according to reports.
"We have to act quickly to remove them all for fear of causing water pollution," Xu Rong, an environmental official, told state-run Global Times newspaper.
He added that the cause of the pigs' deaths may be determined in a few days.
It is still not clear why the animals were dumped in the river in the first place or who was behind it, says the BBC's Martin Patience in Beijing.
It is suspected that the pigs may have come from farms in neighbouring Zhejiang province, local reports say.
Officials say water supplies have not been affected so far and they are closely testing samples from the river, but the public remain wary.
"Is this water still drinkable after dead pigs were found floating in it?" 60-year-old Liu Wanqing was quoted by state-run China Daily newspaper as saying.
"The government has a responsibility to conduct a thorough investigation and provide safe water to residents."
The incident has also generated much discussion online.
"Well, since there supposedly is no problem in drinking this water, please forward this message, if you agree, to ask Shanghai's party secretary, mayor and water authority leaders if they will be the first ones to drink this meat soup?" lawyer Gan Yuanchun said on his microblog.
Another blogger by the name of Ting Tao was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying: "Related government departments should seriously investigate this and get to the bottom of it... The government should really pay attention to people's lives."
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China river's dead pig toll passes 13,000 but officials say water quality is 'normal'
Str / AFP - Getty Images
A dead pig is seen in a dirty tributary of the Yangtze River, in central China's Hebei province, some 750 miles from the city of Shanghai, in a photo taken on March 12, 2013. The number of dead pigs found in the Huangpu River, which runs through China's commercial hub Shanghai, has reached more than 13,000, state media reported on March 18.
March 18, 2013 - via Channel News Asia - The number of dead pigs found in a river running through China's commercial hub Shanghai had reached more than 13,000, the government and state media said Monday, as mystery deepened over the hogs' precise origin.
The Shanghai government said workers pulled 335 pigs out of the Huangpu river, which supplies 22 percent of the city's drinking water, on Monday, bringing the total to 9,795 since the infestation began earlier this month.
Shanghai has blamed farmers in Jiaxing in neighbouring Zhejiang province for dumping pigs which died of disease into the river upstream, where the official Xinhua news agency said another 3,601 dead animals had been recovered so far.
The Jiaxing government has said the area is not the sole source of the carcasses, adding it had found only one producer that could be held responsible.
Shanghai had checked farms in its southwestern district of Songjiang, where the pigs were first detected, but found they were not to blame, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said on Monday.
The scandal has spotlighted China's troubles with food safety, adding the country's most popular meat to a growing list of food items rocked by controversy.
Samples of the dead pigs have tested positive for porcine circovirus, a common swine disease that does not affect humans.
"Due to some farming households having a weak recognition of the law, bad habits, and lack of increased supervision and capability for treatment have led to the situation," the national agriculture ministry's chief veterinarian Yu Kangzhen said.
Yu attributed a higher mortality rate among pigs to colder weather this spring, though he ruled out an epidemic, the ministry said in statement posted on its website over the weekend.
The Shanghai government said in its statement that the quality of drinking water remained within national standards, despite widespread worries over water quality among the city's 23 million residents.
The thousands of dead pigs have drawn attention to China's poorly regulated farm production. Animals that die from disease can end up in the country's food supply chain or improperly disposed of, despite laws against the practice.
In Wenling, also in Zhejiang, authorities announced last week that 46 people had been jailed for up to six-and-a-half years for processing and selling pork from more than 1,000 diseased pigs.
China faced one its biggest food-safety scandals in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill.
In another recent incident, the American fast-food giant KFC faced controversy after revealing that some Chinese suppliers provided chicken with high levels of antibiotics, in what appeared to be an industry-wide practice.
- AFP/ac/fl
Where are they coming from?
via NBC News - Shanghai officials have stepped up surveillance for dead pigs around the Huangpu River and have called upon local government in the nearby city of Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province to step up their own searches.
Just northeast of Shanghai, Jiaxing is believed to be the source of many of the dead pigs floating down into Shanghai. Shanghai’s Information Office officials declined to speculate on whether Jiaxing was the sole source of all the pigs, but told NBC News that the prefecture was the focus of a joint Shanghai-Jiaxing investigation.
An official at the Jiaxing Environmental Protection Agency declined to comment on the progress of the investigation late Monday.
But steps were being taken in Jiaxing to curb the continued dumping of pigs into the region’s waterways. The city’s local newspaper, Jiaxing Daily, reported that leaflets had been passed out to farmers in the region, urging them to properly dispose of dead pigs with local authorities rather than quietly dumping them into the river.
Jiaxing is likely not the only community to be dumping dead pigs into its waterways, as reports indicate that porcine circovirus has spiked across farming communities this winter, killing more pigs than usual. Many have speculated that farmers have been attempting to discretely dispose of the sick pigs rather than reporting them to authorities and risk investigation.
No bird flu virus found in dead pigs
April 2, 2013 - via news.xinhuanet.com - SHANGHAI - No bird flu virus was found in dead pig samples from a river that provides drinkingwater to residents in Shanghai where two died in the first human infections of a new avian influenza strain, authorities said Monday.
Two people in Shanghai, 87 and 27 years old, became ill with fever and coughs in late February and died in early March, suffering from severe pneumonia and difficult breathing, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said Sunday.
The two have been confirmed to be infected with H7N9 avian influenza by an expert teamsummoned by the health and family planning commission, based on clinical observation,laboratory tests and epidemiological surveys.
On Monday, the Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples ofpig carcasses pulled from the Huangpu River running through the city and found no bird fluviruses, the city government said in a statement.
Thousands of dead pigs have been retrieved from the Huangpu River last month, sparking huge panic as well as satire among the public over tap water safety.
The city's health authorities will beef up monitoring over cases of influenza and pneumoniacaused by unknown reasons, according to the statement.
In the first quarter of the year, the city reported similar number of influenza and pneumoniacases compared with average levels over the past three years, it said.
Meanwhile, more than 100 monitoring sites and hospitals in the city reported no cases of SARSand H5N1 avian influenza from mid November to end March, it said.
A third person, a 35-year-old female in Chuzhou city of Anhui Province became ill on March 9and was now in a critical condition after contracting the H7N9 strain.
It is unclear how the three got infected, and no mutual infections were discovered among them,said the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Besides, no abnormalities weredetected among 88 of their close contacts.
The subtype of H7N9 bird flu virus has not been contracted to human beings before. The virusshows no signs of being highly contagious among humans, according to the clinical observationon the cases' close contacts.
However, as only three cases of human infection of H7N9 have been found, relatively littleresearch has been done on it. The expert team is working to study the toxicity and human-infection capacity of the virus, according to the commission.
There are no vaccines against the H7N9 bird flu virus either at home or abroad.
Source
Two people in Shanghai, 87 and 27 years old, became ill with fever and coughs in late February and died in early March, suffering from severe pneumonia and difficult breathing, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said Sunday.
The two have been confirmed to be infected with H7N9 avian influenza by an expert teamsummoned by the health and family planning commission, based on clinical observation,laboratory tests and epidemiological surveys.
On Monday, the Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples ofpig carcasses pulled from the Huangpu River running through the city and found no bird fluviruses, the city government said in a statement.
Thousands of dead pigs have been retrieved from the Huangpu River last month, sparking huge panic as well as satire among the public over tap water safety.
The city's health authorities will beef up monitoring over cases of influenza and pneumoniacaused by unknown reasons, according to the statement.
In the first quarter of the year, the city reported similar number of influenza and pneumoniacases compared with average levels over the past three years, it said.
Meanwhile, more than 100 monitoring sites and hospitals in the city reported no cases of SARSand H5N1 avian influenza from mid November to end March, it said.
A third person, a 35-year-old female in Chuzhou city of Anhui Province became ill on March 9and was now in a critical condition after contracting the H7N9 strain.
It is unclear how the three got infected, and no mutual infections were discovered among them,said the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Besides, no abnormalities weredetected among 88 of their close contacts.
The subtype of H7N9 bird flu virus has not been contracted to human beings before. The virusshows no signs of being highly contagious among humans, according to the clinical observationon the cases' close contacts.
However, as only three cases of human infection of H7N9 have been found, relatively littleresearch has been done on it. The expert team is working to study the toxicity and human-infection capacity of the virus, according to the commission.
There are no vaccines against the H7N9 bird flu virus either at home or abroad.
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