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African swine fever reported in Guangxi Province

China reported an outbreak of African swine fever in Guangxi Province, the first officially reported in 3 years. The outbreak sickened 215 pigs and killed 209 in 4 villages of Guangxi's Nopo County, a remote mountainous area bordering Vietnam. The 4 villages affected have a population of just 795 pigs. According to the report, authorities have taken the usual measures to control the disease by instituting quarantines, disinfecting premises, and taking other preventive measures. Authorities say the disease risk is under control. 

According to the announcement, distribution of live pigs is being tightly controlled in parts of the province. Controls were especially tight during June and July near Guangxi's port cities of Fangcheng and Qinzhou when pigs are likely to be imported from Vietnam.

Reuters reported last week that Vietnam has had 100,000 pigs infected with ASF in 972 outbreaks this year, up from 30,000 infections during the same period last year. 

This month's outbreak in Guangxi is the first officially reported by China since early 2022. This blog has reported intermittent private reports of ASF outbreaks despite the absence of official reports over the last 3 years. The most ASF cases ever reported by China were about 12,000 annually during 2018 and 2019, a tiny fraction of actual cases.

While this week's announcement implies that Nopo County's outbreak was transmitted from neighboring Vietnam and isolated there, reports of monitoring and controls suggest the possibility of a wider geographic spread in Guangxi. Nopo County is about 230 miles northwest of the ports of Qinzhou and Fangcheng. Wuzhou, a region where screening is underway for ASF, is about 450 miles east of Nopo County, and it borders the major hog producing regions of western Guangdong Province. Instructions to monitor imports of pigs from Vietnam suggest that the live pig trade is much larger than reported in China's customs data--which reports only a few hundred live swine imported annually. 

Last December China's agriculture ministry issued a sixth edition of its emergency plan for African swine fever control.

Official reports posted by China's agriculture ministry through June show no ASF outbreaks in either 2024 or 2025 and an increase in outbreaks of pediatric epidemic diarrhea and swine influenza in the first six months of 2025 versus the same period last year. The number of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome cases (PRRS) reported are down this year (there were large PRRS outbreaks reported in April and August 2024). A surge of 199 swine fever cases in the first six months of 2024 was down to 95 in the first six months of 2025.

A truckload of 10 hogs infected with foot and mouth disease was reported by a slaughterhouse in Nanning, capital city of Guangxi, in November 2024. 

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