Animal Disease Spreading in China Quake Zone
Posted on: Saturday, 17 May 2008, 17:15 CDT
Officials in China announced Saturday that the earthquake that killed more than 29,000 people had also badly affected crops and livestock in Sichuan province. Disinfection teams are deploying throughout the region to contain the damage, they said.
Li Jinxiang, head of the veterinary department at the Ministry of Agriculture, told reporters the earthquake had killed about 792,000 of Sichuan's 60 million pigs. However, during a Reuters interview he said the number of breeding sows across the country is up over last year, which could help prevent inflation.
Rescue work for the thousands buried in rubble following the May 12 quake is ongoing, but is being complicated by disrupted water supplies and mass graves. Officials have now augmented efforts with campaigns to prevent disease among the region’s people and animals.
"Preventing disease is one of our largest responsibilities," Li said during a news conference in Beijing.
Most of the area’s 12.5 million bird and livestock deaths consisted of poultry.
The devastating quake has caused infrastructure damage as the region begins the sweltering summer season, a peak time for diseases such as blue ear pig disease, which devastated the hog population in 2007.
The breeding sow population is now 20 percent greater than this time last year, when disease and poor profits discouraged breeding, fueling inflation currently at a 12-year high, Li told Reuters.
Officials said the earthquake had severely damaged fish farms along with 15 percent of vegetable production in the area near the quake’s epicenter. As many as 50,000 greenhouses were also damaged, they reported.
Sichuan province accounts for nearly 15 percent of the country’s rapeseed production, along with 5 percent of vegetables and 7 percent of summer grains. Officials said that while a national surplus of fertilizer should compensate for damaged fertilizer plants in industrial towns such as Shifang, destruction to irrigation infrastructure would be harder to surmount.
The province is releasing reservoir water from reservoirs to lessen pressure on dams that were weakened by the quake.
"Some rice paddies may have to be turned into dry fields this summer," Wei Chaoan, vice minister of agriculture, told Reuters.
"Maybe, as this develops, many other problems will appear, including some we don't know about yet," he added.
Source: redOrbit staff and wire reports
 |
 |
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds