By:Fatima Arkin
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猪肉发烧引起的猪肉短缺会刺激后院家禽养殖，并引发另一个鸟流行。
[MANILA] Meat shortages caused by African swine fever (ASF) sweeping through the Far East are encouraging a shift to poultry production in backyard farms, raising the spectre of a deadly avian influenza pandemic, scientists warn.
“This is very scary because we know that there will be another pandemic,” Kristina Osbjer, a veterinary epidemiologist, until recently with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Cambodia, tells。Net。
“现在，禽流感成为起源的风险增加。”
“When you increase rapidly a species [poultry] in a new area where the condition of biosecurity is not very good what happens? The risk of not only getting avian flu but many diseases is increased automatically”
Vittorio Guberti, Italian Environmental Research and Protection Institute
最近，两种鸟类流感菌株（H5N1和H7N9）袭击了人类，并取得了致命的结果。科学家担心这种病毒会突变成能够进行人类到人类传播的菌株。
In 2006, an outbreak of the H5N1 type of the virus hit eight countries, including Cambodia, China, Indonesia and Thailand, causing the deaths of 79 out of 115 positively diagnosed people,根据到世界卫生组织（WHO）。
The influenza virus is unstable and prone to mutations or the exchange of internal genes, making it difficult to determine how exactly a potential pandemic would play out.
With an increasing number of birds mixing together a bird could get infected by several different subtypes simultaneously, which would result in a “high likelihood” of a new strain of avian influenza emerging, Osbjer explains.
The1918 Spanish flu, which was the first of two pandemics involving the H1N1 influenza virus, eventually infected about one-third of the world’s population and killed an estimated 50 million people.
“现在我们好多了health服务。” Osbjer说。“但是许多国家在处理大量病人和分发足够数量的抗病毒药物方面面临困难medicine。”
Avian influenza is not just a human health risk but also a食品安全risk. If the pandemic originates from birds, there will be a massive culling of not-yet-infected birds to prevent thedisease从进一步传播。由于H5N1，数以百万计的鸟被淘汰。Poultrynumbers will further drop due, in part or whole, to the decrease in the number of chickens that can be raised and market bans on poultry products.
Worst-case scenario
The worst-case scenario would be an enormous rise in food prices, not necessarily in just poultry but also for other meats because of scarcity of supply. “We saw [a dramatic rise in food prices] in 2007/2008,” Osbjer says. “It’s not just about nutrition but about having enough food on the table.”
目前，猪肉是全球摄入量超过36％的肉类最多的肉类。但这将随着最新的粮农组织的报告而改变，该报告指出，ASF已在柬埔寨，老挝PDR，蒙古，缅甸，北朝鲜，菲律宾，韩国，韩国，帝汶，帝摩斯和越南得到证实。ASF虽然对猪来说是致命的，但并不众所周知会影响人类。
At the time of this article’s publication, over 7.1 million pigs were already culled in the aforementioned countries since the first ASF outbreak in China was confirmed in August 2018.
Meanwhile, the World Organisation for Animal Health, theintergovernmental负责协调动物疾病控制的组织告诉。Netthat a “reasonable estimate” would be for a quarter of the world’s pig population to die of ASF.
Unlike Western countries, where plant-based food is上升in popularity, in East Asia and developing countries in general, meat consumption is increasing. As the population booms and incomes rise meat becomes more affordable to a greater number of people.
到2050年，地球上将有近1000亿人口的人，饲料的嘴巴大约要比2010年多，其中大多数在发展中国家。
根据Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – UN Food and Agriculture Organization Agriculture Outlook 2019-2028 report, global meat production is projected to be 13 per cent higher in 2028 relative to now, with developing countries accounting for most of the increase. It states that poultry’s share in total meat production will increase, but at a slower rate than in the past decade.
Melting pot
Vittorio Guberti, a senior researcher at the Italian Environmental Research and Protection Institute who specialises in ASF and avian influenza, says that South-East Asia and China are “melting pots for creating almost every new avian influenza virus” and carry increased risk of generating highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that can be transmitted to humans.
由于在禽流感的致病菌株的出现和传播中存在许多生态和生产因素，因此很难预测其过程。此外，这种疾病是季节性的，因此当亚洲变冷时，禽流感在热点地区外发生爆发的风险更大。
“When you increase rapidly a species [poultry] in a new area where the condition of biosecurity is not very good what happens? The risk of not only getting avian flu but many diseases is increased automatically,” says Guberti.
一些专家担心全球化和经济增长对产生风险的猪和家禽食品系统的影响。除了粮食生产的工业化外，在低生物安全条件下将猪和鸡肉保存的中小型生产商的数量也有所增加。
Smallholderfarmers, particularly those in the developing world, raise roughly 43 per cent of all pigs worldwide and are usually not linked to formal markets, according to data from a 2011 report by FAO and the Kenya-based国际牲畜研究所。
In China alone, almost 98 per cent of total pork production is by small-scale farmers who have fewer than 100 pigs each, according to 2016 data from theNational Bureau of Statistics of China。Meanwhile, poultry is raised by roughly 80 per cent of rural households in developing countries, according to FAO.
“It’s all about biosecurity on the farm,” Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of veterinary epidemiology atCity University of Hong Kongand theRoyal Veterinary Collegein London, tells。Net。While diseases can spread more quickly within big farms, the owners are likely to have the money, resources and motivation to maintain high standards including proper hygiene.
Dealing with lots of small producers is “very tricky” because “there are always some who maybe just did not get the message or don’t want to get the message”, Pfeiffer says.
In addition tocommunicationissues, smallholder farmers don’t seem to be adequately compensated for the much-needed income lost by killing their potentially infected pigs or poultry.
While the Chinese government hasreportedlyoffered US$170 for each pig slaughtered due to ASF, the subsidy is limited to large-scale pig farmers. Smaller farmers may be forced to slaughter their infected animals and sell the meat in their local markets. This is troubling since the ASF virus can live on and spread through dead pigs, unlike avian influenza which dies when its host body is killed.
Women’s role in poultry
Poultry production plays a key role in resource-poor developing countries because it requires few inputs and no land, making it attractive, especially to disadvantaged groups andwomen。
According to a 2017reviewof small-scale poultry production published inGlobal Food Security, in many lower middle-income countries, poultry is usually raised by women and is a realistic way to build a household’s income.
With that in mind, Pfeiffer, as deputy director of the research projectOne Health Poultry Hub, is helping to conductresearchon safe andsustainablepoultry production in selected Asian countries. The UK government-funded project is gathering data in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam to identify vulnerable points in each country’s poultry value chain.
Work has already commenced in Vietnam and Bangladesh, where researchers found local markets key to transmission of the virus. Traders who purchase chickens from different small-scale producers often mix non-infected and infected birds during transportation.
Osbjer says that in Cambodia many markets don’t change the washwaterfor every raw bird that they clean. When tested, the water “was a virus and bacteria soup” , she says. “Sometimes the majority of the samples were positive to influenza virus.”
虽然彻底烹饪可以杀死病毒,在许多Asian countries raw meat products like duck blood are popular.
The good news is that there are vaccines for avian influenza. Over the years several vaccination campaigns have been conducted in some Asian countries and, in 2017, Chinalauncheda massive vaccination campaign against H5N1 and H7N9 targeting all poultry in the mainland.
However, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health, vaccination alone cannot eliminate the virus and should be part of an integrated control programme adapted to the local context — a task that resource-poor Asian countries could find challenging.
这也是昂贵且耗时的，以确保疫苗可用，以防止所有新的循环菌株。Osbjer说：“疫苗的生产总是落后于病毒突变。”“涉及到很多物流，非常非常棘手，尤其是在后院众多家庭饲养鸟类的国家。
A couple of years after the 2004 H5N1 outbreaks in Asia, Vietnam and Indonesia started vaccinating local poultry. “But maintaining the vaccination was found [to be] extremely difficult because the turnover of birds is really high and the lifespan low,” Osbjer says.Rural areas in low- and middle-income countries have limited veterinary services due to a lack of resources and infrastructure. Where they do exist, they are often focused on crop orruminantproduction rather than small-scale poultry production systems.
Furthermore, there seems to be a bias against female farmers who receive only five per cent of农业推广服务, according to FAO data.
Promoting plant-based diets and faux meat could bebeplay足球体育的微博环境friendly solutions to the spread of diseases such as ASF and avian influenza, but researchers question the viability of such a strategy in meat-hungry Asian countries where pork is considered a traditional food.
“We cannot expect overnight that all meat eaters will become vegetarians,” says Andriy Rozstalnyy, an animal production and health officer at FAO. “Some people might say that they will not eat meat, but for how long?”
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