Spanish swine fever outbreak may be linked to food eaten by boar, say officials

Hundreds of police, rangers and military personnel deployed to tackle virus threatening pork export industry

Spanish authorities have deployed hundreds of police officers, wildlife rangers and military personnel in an effort to contain an outbreak of highly infectious African swine fever (ASF) outside Barcelona before it becomes a major threat to the country’s €8.8bn-a-year pork export industry.

Officials believe the virus, detected in the municipality of Bellaterra, may have begun to circulate after a wild boar ate contaminated food that had been brought in from outside Spain.

“The probability that the origin was cold meat, a sandwich or a contaminated product that arrived by road is high because a lot of hauliers pass through Bellaterra,” Catalonia’s agriculture minister, Òscar Ordeig, told local radio on Monday. “That hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s a hypothesis.”

A 4-mile (6km) exclusion zone was set up around Bellaterra after two dead boars tested positive last week for ASF – which was last recorded in Spain in 1994 – and specialists are studying a further eight potential cases.