It is highly doubtful that pigs can swim great distances, especially if sick with flu. Despite this, a colleague from Denmark recently wrote what would make a shocking headline, and would be a great conspiracy story on top of that.
He said; “several dead boars were recently found on Danish shores – coincidence, or is somebody trying to wipe out a competitor?”
Naturally the first thing I did was to turn to a good source, and see what the mainstream Pig News had to say about it, especially now that African Swine Fever (ASF) is rampant in Asia and Eastern Europe, with its origins in Africa, and more recently, the country of Georgia.
Georgia is considered by many experts the source of the current ASF pandemic – one which has the potential to spread to the United States. One only needs to look at the map, something that looks like it was taken from the Cold War 30 years ago to understand the target.
The disease has definitely spread far and wide in recent years, but just how is highly suspect. Perhaps not strangely., it has resulted in a substantial increase in US and European pork sales to China, which have at least doubled, while European pork prices have reached a six-year high, according to international MSM reports.
The first article I found was like a bolt of lightning: Dead wild boars found on Danish coast – no check for ASF.
The fact that it is even suspected that these pigs could have been infected should have rung alarm bells. Why would the animal health authorities drop the ball by not following what would be thought to be normal procedures? Pigs don’t usually just drown – were they tossed into the sea as a means of disposal, or to conceal the actual cause of their deaths?
Furthermore, it is claimed in the article that these were not Danish Boars. Dr. Stig Mellergaard, DVM, chief advisor at the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food, said it was “unlikely” that the boars are of Danish origin. He claimed that “We know that the Danish wild boar population, which is now 30-40 animals, is concentrated in southern Jutland close to the Danish-German border. So it is unlikely that these drowned animals are Danish.”
Why the BIG Deal about Drowned Pigs?
Obviously Denmark wants to say that it is ASF free, for the sake of the pork export business. Dr Mellergaard took this line when he added: “We test all dead and shot wild boar from Denmark (where we know the origin) in order to document that Denmark is free from ASF.” But if that is so, and these pigs really were infected, it implies that those who are profiting from the current ASF outbreak want to steal the market of Danish Bacon, once almost ubiquitous on Western European breakfast tables.
With massive die offs and slaughters across the world, especially in China, Korea and Eastern Europe, pork prices have gone up by 50 percent and will perhaps go higher. It is estimated that at least 25 percent of the Swine population is expected to die as a result of ASF, but not just any 25 percent – the ones which pose the greatest threat to the profiteers are the first to go, rather than their own supplies.
We now know, after having long suspected, that ASF is a man-made disease—in fact it has been used as a bio weapon in Cuba in the early1960’s. There are many serious allegations, as reported in the Georgian media and by American publications such as Veterans Today, that it is more than coincidence that it was introduced to Georgia by individuals working with the US Department of Defense, during what turned out to be a massive field experiment which ended up with the same strain spreading to the Russian Federation and beyond, now Asia, after it had first devastated the Georgian Swine population.
These allegations have since been repeated by Jeffrey Silverman, BS Agriculture, University of Kentucky, and Bureau Chief for Veterans Today, in many articles and interviews. Silverman worked on Swine farms growing up, and later on a Swine Experimental Station in Kentucky, and as an agricultural exchange student in Germany, before moving to Georgia and the former Soviet Union in 1991.
As Silverman and others have previously reported, ASF appeared in Georgia back in 2007 and has since spread to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and most recently several Eastern EU countries. It is currently the greatest threat to pig production in the EU, because it is maintained in the wild boar population, which is expanding in Europe and in which it is practically impossible to control.
It is only one of several such cases concerning the dissemination of deadly diseases. In the US there is compelling evidence that the CIA released whooping cough bacteria into the open air in Florida, and that this was followed by an extremely sharp increase in the incidence of the disease in the state that year. The following year, another toxic substance was disseminated in the streets and tunnels of New York City (Blum).
It is being assumed by the official agencies (but has not been proven) that the virus was brought to Georgia via swill unloaded from ships in Black Sea harbours. The [apparent] fingerprints of the virus trace it back to South-East Africa. The question which comes to mind is whether the introduction of ASF was entirely accidental or not?
Dr. Klaus Depner, head of the International Animal Health Team at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) on the island of Riems in northern Germany, has admitted that even he as an expert has taken some time to understand the disease. He told the publication Pig Progress, in an exclusive interview, that: “I worked for about four years in Africa in the 1990s; that is where I first encountered the disease, albeit under African conditions. I really started actively observing it when it came to Georgia in 2007.”
Just how it got to Georgia is still highly debated. But we can assume that it didn’t suddenly jump there through natural transfer methods, because any discussion of this subject attracts many recriminations, especially against the Georgian and Russian media, and against Jeffrey Silverman for allegedly spreading false information about how the disease has been spread.
Most scientific debates are conducted within the scientific community, and generally do not reach the general public. This one is being treated as a political question, so it probably is. Also in Romania they say anyone that claims any conspiracy about ASF is an agent of disinformation or useful idiot.
Silverman is a former US military expert on biological and chemical weapons. He was the first to report the dangers of laboratories like the Lugar Center. He believes that the authorities of both Georgia and the United States are afraid that information about the real state of affairs will become known to the public, which would explain why political damage limitation, rather than scientific analysis of the problem, is taking place.
There have been recent fears that the disease will even make its way back to the United States. Then where it came from would become mainstream news, and this would jeopardize further covert experiments with bacteria and viruses. Moreover, such a disease would set many foreign, until now unsuspecting, populations against the policies of the US, and the Lugar military lab in Georgia itself.
It is not as if the United States does not have a track record of using bio weapons. As reported in Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945, a similar virus was once alledgley transferred from a CIA training base in the Panama Canal Zone.
Regardless of the credibility of those making these claims, it is now clear that that ASF did spread from the Caucasus, especially Georgia, even before the mentioned lab was fully operational, and moved via Russia and other CIS countries into the Baltics and Poland and beyond.
The implication, considering the American track record, is that the outbreak in China was created deliberately, and is part of a pattern of such outbreaks designed with an offensive purpose. There is therefore little wonder that the Russian government has said that it will take diplomatic and military measures against the Lugar laboratory if necessary.
The question is how the same strain of ASF which spread from Georgia ended up in China. It is clear that ticks and insects are unlikely to have transmitted the virus.
We can suspect that more modern methods of transmission may have been used, perhaps including specially equipped drones.
Home to Roost
It is interesting that, as reported by the Washington Post, U.S. authorities have started active preparations in response to the rising threat of an outbreak of African swine fever. It is admitted that the disease has decimated the Chinese pig population and is spreading across Asia, but not that it might have origins closer to home. This, too, is an attempt at damage limitation – rather like closing your borders to prevent foreign terrorists bombing your cities, like Boston, so no one notices that you are paying selected natives with conveniently foreign sounding names to bomb them for you.
Perhaps veterinarian experts should turn to the Lugar Lab in Georgia for answers as how to contain this possible outbreak. This would be the ideal way to disprove all the purported conspiracy theories about the work of the lab, who is working there and who they are actually working for, and showcase what is actually being done under the banner of science. After all, this civilian “scientific institute” is still run by the US Department of Defense, most unusually, even though the Government of Georgia claims otherwise, and could readily substantiate that claim, with the appropriate legal documents, if it were true.
“Anti-Western” channels are continuing to discredit the centre, and to portray it as the US weapon against Georgia, thus fueling skepticism about Georgia’s strategic partner – the USA. But does being “anti-Western” make them wrong?
It is “anti-Western” to deprive people of democracy too, but that is supposed by the same people to be perfectly alright as long as only foreigners with less money are affected.
The ongoing slaughtering of pigs, to slow the spread of ASF and ensuring pork shortages is but the beginning of this story—and should ASF spread more, it could be even worse than that.
One only has to consider the zoonotic nature of the ASF virus, at least according to some experts who should know best. The African swine fever (ASF) virus may in the future become dangerous for humans, according to the former head of the Russian Epidemiology Service, Chief State Sanitary Doctor Gennady Onishchenko, as reported back in 2013.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
