Learn More About African Swine Fever During ASF Action Week This Week

African swine fever is a very real threat to U.S. pork producers. This week, producers can learn more about ASF through a series of webinars hosted by USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service.

Associate Administrator at USDA APHIS Dr. Jack Shere says ASF Action Week will reiterate preparation and prevention measures for ASF, including where it is, what’s at stake and what is known about the disease.

“Taking steps to prepare for ASF, those are things that the government has done, that producers should do, exclusionary activities that we have in place, things like vaccine development, which, currently there is no vaccine, what diagnostics are available. And then what states activities there are in place in regards to ASF, everybody’s taking this disease very seriously.”

By midweek, the focus will switch to biosecurity, what producers can do to protect their operations and what to do if there is an ASF outbreak in the United States.

“Mainly, what will our response look like, what about tracing, contact tracing, what will that look like.  And lessons that we learned in regard to battle that we had in 2015 when high path avian influenza in the United States, and then just generally animal health and the direction we’ll go with that. And finally on Friday, a key component that you can’t leave out in regards to ASF is feral swine. How will they factor into the response.”

Producers still have time to register for the webinars, which are live from 2-3:30 EDT each day, on the USDA APHIS website. They are encouraged to sign up for the USDA APHIS stakeholder registry to receive ASF Action Week emails and exclusive printable ASF materials.

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