Floating pigs may be killed by epidemic

Porcine circovirus is one of the diseases that killed many pigs now floating down a river in Songjiang District, the Shanghai Agricultural Commission said this morning.

By yesterday, more than 1,200 dead pigs had been removed from the river.

Experts from the Shanghai Animal Diseases Control and Prevention Centre collected hearts, livers, spleens, lungs, lymph nodes and tonsils from five carcasses retrieved last Friday.

They found six viral pathogens in the samples. One pig was tested positive of porcine circovirus, an epidemic common among pigs in recent years. But the virus is not a zoonosis and will not infect humans, the commission said.

Experts are still investigating the causes of dead pigs dumped by pig farms upstream in neighboring Zhejiang Province.

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