Chinese officials fired for pig disease cover-up
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Four officials have been sacked for trying to cover up the trail of dead pigs early in an outbreak of a swine-borne disease that has killed 39 people in southwest China, Xinhua news agency said on Monday.
The officials, all from near Neijiang in Sichuan province, had fabricated reports and deceived inspectors and reporters tracing the spread of the Streptococcus suis bacteria, Xinhua said on its English Web site, http://www.chinaview.cn.
More than 200 people have contracted the disease in Sichuan from slaughtering, handling or eating infected swine.
After 78 pigs died in Zizhong county in mid-July, the head of the county animal husbandry and food bureau and three colleagues wrote a report falsely claiming all the dead swine had been safely buried or their whereabouts were unknown and they lied to investigators and state television reporters, Xinhua said.
Weeks into the outbreak that has killed around 650 pigs in the province, many poor farmers were apparently ignoring orders to safely dispose of sick and infected swine and were still butchering, eating and even selling them.
“The reporters discovered the truth did not fit with what the officials claimed,” Xinhua said.
“Their deception backfired and resulted in their dismissal,” Neijiang mayor Wang Minghui was quoted as saying.
The outbreak in China’s top pork-producing province was first reported in June but did not surface in the Chinese media until almost a month later.
China was widely criticised for initially covering up the 2002-2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in south China and spread across 30 nations, infecting nearly 8,500 people and killing about 800.
Before the four dismissals were reported, the central government vowed to punish anyone who falsified or delayed reports on the Streptococcus suis outbreak.
Two officials from hard-hit Ziyang city were previously sacked for failing to warn farmers about the disease.
Health experts in southern Guangdong province, where two infections have been reported, had proposed testing all people involved in slaughtering or shipping pigs to see if any were carrying the bacteria, Xinhua said in a separate report.
China insists the outbreak is under control.
Just over 100 victims were still in hospital in Sichuan and 10 were in critical condition, the Health Ministry said in an official statement.
Streptococcus suis is endemic in most pig-rearing countries but human infections are rare.
Although China’s state media have said no human-to-human infections have been found in Sichuan, the death toll is considered unusually high. Overuse of antibiotics could be behind the outbreak by pushing the bacteria to mutate into a new, drug-resistant strain.
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