Kaylee Hillinger 

Welcome to The Round Barn, a podcast devoted to all things livestock. Our goal is to offer provocative insights, challenge conventional wisdom, and never be boring. I’m your host for today, Kailey Hillinger. Joining me is Dr. Jim Lowe, a large animal veterinarian and member of the faculty of the College of Veterinary Medicine. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Let’s not start calling me a large animal veterinarian. I mean, there are some things we have to be careful of. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

You are on the faculty of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois. Hi, Jim. How are you today? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Good, Kaylee. How are you? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

I am excellent, thank you. Today, I’d like to talk to you about ASF, African Swine Fever. I feel like that’s where you insert your “wah-wah-wah”. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, that’s. That is- “wah-wah”. That would be the right sound. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

In case any of our listeners are not embedded in the swine industry and hearing about ASF constantly. Give us a quick reminder about what ASF is. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So ASF is a viral disease and as you see, it’s African Swine Fever. So it originated in Africa and has really been endemic there for a long time. The cool part about ASF is it’s the largest virus we know of. It’s this huge DNA virus, but we know very little about it. It’s been really, really hard to study. So it’s – it’s been an interesting deal. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Why we’re all cranked up about it is that there was an introduction almost ten years ago when out of the country of Georgia. So not the state of Georgia. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Not the state. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

No, they’re different. And Giorgi Bezhanishvili was from there. So, you know, that’s the important. So that was a basketball player at Illinois. And these are the important facts you have to know about. So ASF was introduced into this genotype 2, which is different than what floats around in Africa most of the time, was introduced into Georgia and is spread really across all of Eastern Europe and then has moved to China and throughout Asia. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So everybody is all in knots because they’ve not been successful at eradicating it out of Eastern Europe. And really now we’ve got spread and China’s turned into an unmitigated disaster for the industry. So the threat is, is that we get it here in the U.S. And the big threat, if we get it in the U.S. is- is that it’s a “foreign” animal disease. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And I put that in quotes. It’s not a disease in the U.S., but it’s got trade implications. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

So it’s all over the world right now. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Not in Western Europe, very much. A little bit in Germany, but certainly in Eastern Europe. There’s a lot of pigs in Eastern Europe, certainly all over Asia. It’s obviously in Africa and not a lot of commercial pigs in Africa. Quite a few pigs in Africa are not commercial, but it’s not – it’s in the Dominican Republic. It’s in Haiti. So it’s on Hispaniola that that island. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But it’s not made it made it to the mainland. But the big concern is it’s everywhere, but it’s not here. And we export a lot of meat. And if it is here, we can’t export because our trade partners won’t take it. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. So my question for you about all of this is, why is it not here? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

That fits in the category of if I knew that I would be in the Bahamas drinking Mai Tais and not talking to you. I would not be on the faculty at the University of Illinois because I would be so wealthy that I would get on with it. That is one of the great mysteries of the world, right? I think there’s two or three things everybody’s gotten panicky about ASF, but you know, ASF doesn’t transmit very easily. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So unlike things like foot-and-mouth disease or, you know, really other common pig diseases or cattle diseases, we don’t get rapid transmission of ASF. It’s only transmitted primarily in blood or in meat and it has not appeared. It’s moved around Europe is where is going to start to say really by human move, not pig move. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Okay. So people going from barn to barn. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

No, people carrying their sausages around. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Oh, their meats. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, they’re meats they’re carrying around. It’s like, you know, it’s not the Arby’s, “We got the meat,” but it’s the European, “We carry the sausage for lunch.” And so ASF survives in even dried sausage for really, really long periods of time. It’s really stable in meat. And so the running joke in Romania is, is that there’s a 500 year supply of ASF in all the freezers there because you get into parts of eastern – Romania has been the worst of Eastern Europe. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And so in that part- there’s a lot of village pigs, I think is the best way to put it is they’re small holders. All they do is keep pigs around and they butcher those pigs as part of the Christmas celebration holiday stuff. Well, if those pigs are infected, they butcher, all of that meat’s infected. Put it in the freezer. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

It’s stable for a really long period of time. So then they take that meat back out of the freezer or take it even if they’re making fancy sausages and keeping those sausages, that meat itself is contaminated. And if you look at there’s been some really nice work that truck drivers are eating a sausage, driving around with salami, a dried sausage, and they throw out the scraps from their lunch. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Wild boars eat the scraps and then those wild boars get infected. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Ok, wild boar infection. I was thinking about garbage feeding and some of those other challenges we have. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

That’s a scare in the US. So we don’t.- we’ve got feral pigs, but the fear is right. Oh, you get it in the U.S. and you get contaminated stuff, you’ve got garbage feeding, you know, those are all the big deals. But the virus itself has kind of moved around with people movement, not with pig movement. And I think it maybe makes a bigger mystery. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Why is it not here? But because a lot of people come into this country. But I think it says something about CBP, Customs Border Patrol and their ability to control meat entry and the Beagle Brigade and all the.. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

The dogs right? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And dogs. Yes, the beagle sniffing you when you come in. Right. And that’s really what they’re focused on, saying, “How do we detect meat?” And then there’s some fruit pests. And don’t ask me that question because I don’t know. But there are some fruit pests that they’re very worried about as well. So they’re trained to sniff fruit, particularly from Asia they’re bringing in, you know, bugs primarily. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

So do we know if the Beagle Brigade has actually caught ASF-positive meat? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

No, they will not release that. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

They won’t test? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

They don’t release that information. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Oh, so they do test though. So someone knows. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah. If it is there somebody should know. That’s right. So if I don’t, if you’ve ever seen the pictures, Kaylee but those that have been put out at O’Hare. The pounds upon pounds upon pounds – I mean it’s tons of food that they find in food coming in, the beagles and the scanners and everything else. And so, yeah, my understanding is there is a testing process going on and they’re screening for more than ASF, right? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

They’re screening for all these things, but saying what’s really happening there. But they don’t want to really it’s national security stuff, right? They’re like, oh, we don’t want to tell people what we’re doing and how we know. And so that process is guarded in secrecy for good reason. But certainly that process appears to be at this point working pretty well. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And then the other lucky bit is right in the US, if you look at in Europe, where they’ve had issues in commercial pigs, they have a lot of small holder village pigs where they’ve got these pigs and you’ve got this endemic reservoir and then they’re dragging that into the commercial population. Well, in the U.S., right. We don’t have very many people that work on pig farms. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Right. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And so a lot of the people- 

Kaylee Hillinger 

But we have a few people that work on a lot of pig farms. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

That’s true. Like veterinarians. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yep. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

You could always autoclave your veterinarians. That would solve some problems. But the… right but the bit is right, so we think about people traveling overseas, so they go to the Dominican on vacation and come back. You know, there’s a lot of resort stuff, right? They come back and like, are they going to bring infected stuff back? Majority of those people, even if it would bring it back, if they’re in the city, they’re not going to contact pigs anyway. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And so any garbage they bring back probably ends up in the landfill, you know, So I think if we look culturally where we’re at, we’ve got a little bit less risk just how the U.S. is organized. But I don’t really know why. I don’t know why we don’t have it here. I mean, you would say we should, but boy, we just. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

We all thought we would. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah. Thank good, thank goodness we don’t because we’re not ready. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

That’s a discussion for another day. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, it is a discussion for another day. But the thing is, we don’t. But. Yeah, no, no, no. We are – we are – there’s a lot of preparation being made, but we’re not ready for it. I think if you look at the other diseases particularly, but in the pig world, right, so we brought in 2014, we brought in PED or porcine epidemic diarrhea virus. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

It even uses the word coronavirus, but it is a porcine coronavirus. Very, very different than the other coronavirus. But that virus right, is really stable. But it’s shed in the feces so anything that has poop on it could have been contaminated. So we think we brought that from some soybeans contaminated in Asia, etc.. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And so we’ve been focused on the feed route. But feed is as – doesn’t appear to be as nearly as big a deal on ASF. It’s probably primarily, you know like what are we doing with meat imports and we’ve been pretty good at that so far. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

That was part of my next – where my line of thought was. So if meat is the number one concern, what’s number two? And I was thinking you are going to tell me feed. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Well I think feed is still is a concern, but I think it’s an order of magnitude. And one of the big challenges we have of all of this biosecurity, how do we keep the country safe? We have a big understanding of what’s possible. We don’t have a big understanding of what’s probable. And so you start playing whack a mole and you hope you’re guessing the most likely routes, because we don’t have a very good feel for what’s most likely. We know what could happen, but we don’t know which one’s most likely to happen. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And that’s really a problem with all of these biocontainment, biosecurity, strategy. You got all these things. What could – could it be in air? Could it be in mosquitoes? Could it be in meat? Could it be in feed? Could it be in…? Yeah, it could be all of those things. And so we don’t have or haven’t figured out a very good way to say, oh, it’s most likely in this pathway, it’s this thing and we should spend the most energy on that. So after the… 

Kaylee Hillinger 

I mean feed would be an easy one to pick off the top because it goes in so many different directions once it arrives as an import. Right is that what you mean as far as the magnitude of impact? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Well, that could be the magnitude of impact because that’s what we kinda proved probably with PED, that once we got it here, it was everywhere. It was over here quickly. But can ASF transmit in feed? Yeah, we’ve got really clear evidence that it can be in feed. What we don’t know is how likely is feed to be contaminated. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah. Okay. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And we don’t know how likely is meat to get past Customs and Border Protection or how likely- 

Kaylee Hillinger 

I can tell you my sister lived in Germany and she brought us some sausages and felt very proud that she got through the Beagle Brigade until I told her the implication of it. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

You should have sent her to jail. That was illegal. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Edit that out. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

But she didn’t know. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

She didn’t. Yeah, and I think that’s a- that’s a problem is the normal person going through doesn’t understand why those rules are in place and the consequences of breaking them. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And I also think it’s really hard when you say we’re going to put up these filters, for lack of a better word. So my – my example, I was giving people is like, you get on an airplane, you’ve been through airplanes and security and TSA. And so several years ago, pre-COVID, whenever that was, I was flying to Oklahoma, you know, I’m a veterinarian, so I have things like necropsy knives occasionally with me. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So for some reason I dropped a necropsy knife. Note – for everybody to get your head around the necropsy knife I use, it’s – it’s a six blade, six inch boning knife. So its got a black plastic handle, six inches of stainless steel boning knife. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

It looks scary to the common person. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah it would be scary the common person. And so this thing was in my briefcase. I didn’t think about it. Apparently I cleaned it, sharpened it and had thrown it in there, put it back on my truck or something and forgot to take it out. I flew to Oklahoma, got to the farm, was rummaging in my briefcase, and cut my finger and realized, oh, there’s… 

Kaylee Hillinger 

It went all the way through security with this necropsy knife. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yeah, I’d flown with this thing. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Oh, my goodness. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

So thank goodness they didn’t find it because I think it would have been bad. But that right – and that’s a pretty good system. None of us are looking at that going, Oh, that’s a bad system. I’m not banging on the system. I’m just saying when you set up something and the goal is to catch everything, that’s really, really hard. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yep. There’s a certain percent that meet success. And things will fall through. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And if you think about “how the necropsy knife make it?” Well, it’s a thin piece. It’s high carbon steel. It doesn’t show up on x rays very good. Boom, boom. Right. You can get it, oh it was probably in a thin profile laying next to a laptop or something. Oh, it just got screened out. Right. They just missed it. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Same with the sausage my sister brought from… 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

That’s exactly right. They brought it through. It isn’t that the system’s bad. It’s just that you can’t be perfect in any of those systems. Whether that’s feed or sausage or whatever. And so I think we sit up every day and you can’t – I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that stuff. People get all cranked up with me and say, Oh, no, no, no, we should be doing those things, but we can’t say that’s the only way we’re going to keep it out. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And we can’t say that that is going to be foolproof. I think we feel like it’s foolproof and then we let our guard down. And so my concern with ASF is not that we don’t have it yet, it’s that we don’t have it yet and everybody’s pretty tired of talking about ASF. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah, and are our systems in place? What’s going to fall through the cracks there? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And is everybody going to get tired of checking and give up and we let our guard down? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Right. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And I think if I look at ASF, that’s our biggest risk. It’s that it’s not happened. And it was like, yeah, it hadn’t happened. Must not be that bad. So I don’t know why it’s not here. That was the question you asked me. I’m actually probably less worried about it getting here now than I was. My experience having good fortune of spending some time in Romania and a little bit in Lithuania working on farms that are infected, 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

it’s really hard to move like these farms are in literally surrounded by African Swine Fever positive villages. And when I say surrounded, I mean a kilometer away. Or 150 meters away, and there’s infected pigs. We know it. We don’t- you know, you just know they’re infected. They’re all infected. And yet we don’t get these commercial farms infected 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

with kind of reasonable biosecurity. I mean they think It’s radical, but I mean, it’s what we would do here in the U.S. So I think it’s pretty hard to move if that makes you feel better. But when’s the Beagle Brigade get distracted? I’m using that generically, right? I mean, the dog isn’t going to get distracted, but when are we going to get distracted? 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Say we’re going to go on to do something else and see what happens there? 

Kaylee Hillinger 

What falls through the system and then the next system, and then the next system. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

And then disaster happens. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

We don’t know. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

We don’t know. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

If we did, we’d be sitting in the Bahamas. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

Yes. And if we do get ASF I think I can go back to spaying cats and I can’t even do that. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

You better practice. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

I’m too old to fight another one of these battles. I’ve done two. I’ve done PRRS and PED. I’m not doing a third one. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Yeah, okay. Well, thank you for sharing your insights and opinions. Have a great day. 

Dr. Jim Lowe 

You too. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Thank you all for joining us. Please subscribe and tell your friends about The Round Barn. It’s available on iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice. One last thing. In addition to this podcast, we offer a wide variety of online learning products for livestock producers and veterinarians, including a master’s of veterinary science degree. You can learn more about those by visiting online.vetmed.illinois.edu. 

Kaylee Hillinger 

Thanks for listening.