The Spanish government does not rule out the possibility of an accidental release from the laboratory of the virus that causes African swine fever

The Spanish government announced on Friday that it “does not rule out” the possibility of an accidental leak from a laboratory as the origin of the African swine fever outbreak discovered at the end of November in Catalonia, a first on the national territory in the last three decades, reports AFP, according to News.ro.

Harmless to humans, African swine fever is a hemorrhagic viral disease with an almost 100% mortality rate in pigs and wild boars.

Since November 28, 13 cases have been detected in an area of ​​Catalonia (north-east), and the authorities are trying to stop the spread of the disease, including mobilizing a hundred soldiers.

Faced with this unprecedented situation in the last 30 years, the Ministry of Agriculture in Spain announced in a statement on Friday that “it will open an additional investigation into the origin of the virus”.

According to the ministry, citing a report presented on Friday by the laboratory in the Madrid region that carried out the sequencing of the virus detected in Catalonia, its genetic group does not correspond to the one currently circulating in the ten European countries affected by African swine fever.

Instead, it is “very similar” to the viral strain called “Georgia 2007”, “a reference virus frequently used in experimental infections that are made in the field of intensive animal breeding to carry out virological studies or to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccines under development”, according to the Spanish ministry.

Thus, “the report (of the laboratory located near Madrid – no) suggests that the virus does not come from animals or animal products from certain countries where the infection is currently present”, points out the ministry. And he adds, more explicitly: “The discovery of a virus similar to the one that circulated in Georgia does not, therefore, exclude the possibility that it came from a biological isolation facility.”

Until now, another hypothesis considered by experts was that the virus could have reached there by means of contaminated sausages transported on the road, thrown away and then eaten by a wild boar.

A laboratory (IRTA-CReSA) with biological containment units of level 2 and 3 (on a scale of 4) is located a few kilometers from the area in Catalonia where the dead boars were found.

On Thursday, Joaquim Segalès, one of its researchers, rejected in a statement to AFP the hypothesis of an accidental leak, assuring that he had “no element to suggest that the center could be at the origin of the current epidemic” of African swine fever, studied “for 18 years” in this laboratory.

Òscar Ordeig, the head of agriculture in the Catalan government, said on Friday that the regional authorities “neither confirm nor deny” this hypothesis, citing “missing information”. The Spanish government does not rule out the possibility of an accidental leak from the laboratory of the virus that causes African swine fever