Source: Dow Jones News Service, March 12, 2013
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Authorities in Shanghai late Tuesday appealed for calm as they acknowledged finding far more dead pigs in local rivers than earlier indicated and laid blame for the gruesome waterway disposal on careless farmers in a neighboring Chinese province.
In its latest estimate, the Shanghai municipal government said 5,916 pigs had been retrieved by Tuesday afternoon from the city’s Huangpu River and tributaries, more than six times the number authorities initially reported over the weekend. Key government bureaus in Shanghai played down public concerns about human and animal health from the incident, saying there is no epidemic and that the city’s drinking water remains safe. They said the problem was isolated to poor pig-farming methods in a town near Shanghai.
“The Shanghai municipal government pays great attention to improving the situation in the upper reaches of the Huangpu River after the floating-pig incident,” said a statement published by the municipal-government news service Eastday.com.
One of China’s odder and more unsettling pollution scares has Shanghai on edge because most of the tap water for its 23 million residents comes from intakes on the Huangpu River. The river flows through Shanghai’s central districts about 70 kilometers (43 miles) downstream from where the pigs were floating.
The government reiterated Tuesday that its testing has detected only porcine circovirus pathogen, a disease that U.S. and Chinese researchers say affects pigs but isn’t a known health concern for humans. Officials said water monitoring is constant and that they are sample-testing retrieved dead pigs.
Pig recovery work appeared to expand on Tuesday. More than 200 boats had been dispatched to scoop carcasses for burying and other accepted disposal methods, according to the Eastday report. It said fewer and fewer were being found Tuesday.
Aside from basic carelessness, authorities could provide little indication of why so many animals ended up in the river.
Chinese authorities said the source of dead pigs is a city close to Shanghai called Jiaxing in neighboring Zhejiang province. Officials and farmers there, quoted in government-run media, said producers used simple procedures to dispose of dead animals.
A statement from the agriculture department of Zhejiang said no signs of an epidemic were found among animals in Jiaxing, China’s Xinhua news agency reported. The death rate of local hogs was also normal, said Jiang Hao, vice head of the animal husbandry bureau of Jiaxing. Experts said that with a Chinese pig population approaching half a billion, large-scale premature deaths aren’t necessarily an indication of widespread problems.
Although the pig story remained a hot topic on Chinese social media, it was played down in Shanghai’s government-run outlets. The city’s main hourlong news broadcast Tuesday evening spent only a few minutes late in the show on the subject, reporting mostly from Jiaxing. Most newspapers published the pig story on inside pages of Tuesday’s editions and cited figures from Sunday.