Berlin (AFP)

Sniffing dogs, drones or electric fences: Germany tries by all means to prevent wild boars from neighboring countries from transmitting swine fever, synonymous with economic disaster in a country where the pig is king.

The German authorities are worried about the rapid advance of this viral disease highly contagious in suidae but harmless to humans. After cases discovered in Belgium last year but quickly mastered, the eyes are now turning to the east.

The appearance of a home in mid-November in western Poland had already worried the sector. But the discovery in early December of a wild boar carrying African swine fever (ASF) in Nowogrod Bobrzanski, just forty kilometers from the border, has put the German authorities on alert.

"The question is no longer whether the PPA will reach Germany, but when! The virus survives in the mud of the wheel arches for up to 100 days", is tormented Torsten Reinwald, spokesman of the German Federation hunting, questioned by AFP.

So it is the jumble of combat in several German regions, where are tested different methods to hunt down.

- Who lives -

A special unit of six sniffer dogs trained to find dead boars has been set up in the Saarland, France. His goal: to quickly find any carcasses of animals that were sick.

In Saxony, bordering Poland, hunters, veterinarians and rescuers are trained during practical exercises. Armed with drones or infrared cameras, they simulate the appearance of an infectious case and its management.

Further north, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has purchased a 50-kilometer electrified mobile fence for 50,000 euros in hopes of limiting the passage of warthogs from Poland.

An eventuality that has become a reality in Denmark: with great foresight, the Scandinavian kingdom has just completed the construction of a 70-kilometer fence on its border with Germany, supposed to block any arrival of wild boar.

Since 2014, the virus has first spread to the Eastern European countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova, Slovakia, Romania), wreaking havoc in the pig populations.

"The possibility of an infection from sick wild boars crossing the border is very high, more today than inadvertently human," admits Sandra Blome, head of the National Swine Fever Laboratory at the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute.

This last track was so far preferred: a ham sandwich contaminated by PPA, which can survive for several months in smoked products, thrown to the ground and eaten by a wild boar.

"Since it first appeared in Europe in 1957, the virus has almost always been imported into other countries by airports or ports and it has been exterminated everywhere, except in Sardinia," says Blome.

Informative posters from the Ministry of Agriculture urging travelers not to let their leftovers linger flourish in trains and rest areas.

- Systematic slaughter -

Although harmless to humans, this highly contagious viral disease causes hemorrhages that can be fatal in a few days in domestic boars and pigs. No vaccine has proven itself.

Slaughtering contaminated livestock is the only way to prevent the spread of the disease, a nightmare for German farmers. Producing almost 5 million tonnes of this meat each year, half of which is destined for the foreign market, Germany is Europe's leading exporter of pigs.

But in the first case of PPPs, non-EU export of all domestic production becomes impossible.

"The likelihood that countries like China impose a total import ban is very high - they have already done so in Belgium," said Sarah Dhem, representative of the German meat industry.

And the economic losses could be in billions of euros, with a European market submerged with pigs certainly healthy but at broken prices.

Paradoxically, Germany has so far benefited economically from swine fever, which has been wreaking havoc since mid-2018 in China, where officially more than one million pigs had to be slaughtered.

This much-loved meat there has seen its price soar, and the country is expected to more than double its imports in 2019.

© 2019 AFP