African swine fever in wild boar in Europe: a notable challenge

Abstract

ASF was reintroduced into continental Europe via an incursion in Georgia in April 2007 from where it rapidly spread into Armenia, affecting domestic pigs and wild boar (Sanchez-Vizcaino and others 2013). ASF further expanded through wild boar populations around the Caucasus mountains (OIE 2012, Sanchez-Vizcaíno and others 2013). Spread into Azerbajan, Chechnya, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus caused large-scale epidemics in domestic pigs. Concurrent infection of domestic pig and wild boar populations has led to the persistence of ASF in many areas. Controlling ASF in Russia and the Caucasus region proved to be extremely difficult, reflecting the complexity of regional sanitary, economic, environmental and sociocultural factors (Sanchez-Vizcaino and others 2013). There are no vaccines and ASF is still on the move (Oura 2014). ASF entered the European Union in 2014, with the first cases in Lithuania followed by Poland, Latvia and Estonia. The first detections in all of these EU member states were in wild boar found dead.