※ [本文转录自 icrose 信箱]
作者: DreamYeh (天使) 看板: Gossiping
标题: [爆卦] 路透社-在武汉肺炎之前 中国隐匿猪瘟
时间: Fri Mar 6 10:44:04 2020
https://reurl.cc/5lgro6
Special Report: Before coronavirus, China bungled swine epidemic with secrecy
(Reuters) - When the deadly virus was first discovered in China, authorities
told the people in the know to keep quiet or else. Fearing reprisal from
Beijing, local officials failed to order tests to confirm outbreaks and didn’
t properly warn the public as the pathogen spread death around the country.
当致命病毒在中国首次发现时，有关当局告诉知情人士隐匿疫情。
由于担心受到北京当局的处分，当地官员未能下令进行筛检以确认疾病爆发，
且没有即时警告世人，直到病原体在全国各地传播造成死亡
All this happened long before China’s coronavirus outbreak, which has
claimed more than 3,000 lives worldwide in less than three months. For the
past 19 months, secrecy has hobbled the nation’s response to African swine
fever, an epidemic that has killed millions of pigs. A Reuters examination
has found that swine fever’s swift spread was made possible by China’s
systemic under-reporting of outbreaks. And even today, bureaucratic secrecy
and perverse policy incentives continue undermining Chinese efforts to defeat
one of the worst livestock epidemics in modern history.
武汉肺炎在短短三个月内就造成3000多人死亡，但其实事情早有迹象。
在过去19个月前，中国对于非洲猪瘟就采取隐匿策略，而造成数百万头
猪死亡，路透社的一项调查发现，猪瘟之所以传播快速，正式由于中国
对于猪瘟疫情采取隐匿手段。
即使在今天，官僚主义的保密策略、和不正当的政策。仍然在破坏中国
对抗非洲猪瘟－这个近代史上最严重的猪只传染病所做的各种防疫策略
。
Beijing’s secretive early handling of the coronavirus epidemic has troubling
similarities to its missteps in containing African swine fever, but with the
far higher stakes of a human infection. After the coronavirus was found in
December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, local and national
officials were slow to sound the alarm and take actions disease experts say
are needed to contain deadly outbreaks. Beijing continues to gag negative
news and online postings about the disease, along with criticism of the
government’s response.
北京当局在武汉肺炎开始大流行之前隐匿病情，和对非洲猪瘟处理的失误，
有着令人不安的相似，但人类感染的风险更高！在2019年12月，湖北武汉市
就发现了冠状病毒，但地方、国家官员对于警报反应迟钝，疾病专家表示需
要采取行动以抑制病情致命爆发。
北京政府却继续控制有关于该病情的负面新闻、网络文章、以及封锁对于政
府的批判。
With swine fever, Beijing set a tone of furtiveness across government and
industry by denying or downplaying the severity of a disease that the meat
industry estimates has shrunk China’s 440-million-hog herd by more than
half. The epidemic has taken a quarter of the world’s hogs off the market,
hurt livelihoods, caused meat prices to spike globally and pushed food
inflation to an eight-year high.
北京当局因为对猪瘟严重性否认、轻描淡写，从而在政府与相关行业形成虚假声音。
从而造成严重后果，根据肉类业者估计，这疾病已经造成4.4亿头猪减少一半以上。
这种流行病已经使全球四分之一的猪只被感染，造成严重损害，肉类价格在全球飙
升，并且使食物通膨率达到八年来最高
Cover-ups across China - coupled with underfinancing of relief for devastated
pig farmers and weak enforcement of restrictions on pork transport and
slaughter - have enabled the spread of the livestock virus to the point where
it now threatens pig farmers worldwide, according to veterinarians, industry
analysts and hog producers. Since the China outbreak, African swine fever has
broken out in 10 countries in Asia.
兽医表示，中国各地刻意地隐匿，加上对于受灾猪农救济资金不足、对猪肉运输
和屠宰的限制执行不力，已经使家畜病毒在世界各地传播。目前已经威胁到全球
猪农
The vacuum of credible information has made it impossible for farmers,
industry and government to tell how and why the disease spread so quickly,
making preventive measures difficult, said Wayne Johnson, a Beijing-based
veterinarian who runs Enable Ag-Tech Consulting.
“To get it under control, you have to know where it is,” Johnson said.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement to
Reuters that it has repeatedly communicated to all regions the importance of
timely and accurate reporting of African swine fever outbreaks and had zero
tolerance for hiding and delaying the reporting of cases.
Interviews with farmers, industry analysts and major suppliers to China’s
pork sector indicate otherwise. More than a dozen Chinese farmers told
Reuters they reported disease outbreaks to local authorities that never made
it into Beijing’s official statistics. Those infections are going unreported
to central authorities in part because counties lack the cash to follow a
separate requirement from Beijing to compensate farmers for pigs killed to
control the disease.
Local officials have also avoided reporting outbreaks out of fear of the
political consequences. And they have routinely refused to test pigs for the
virus when mass deaths are reported, according to interviews with farmers and
executives at corporate producers.
由于担心造成政治后果（被和谐），当地官员选择隐匿疫情的爆发。
根据对于农民和管理人员的采访显示，当猪只有大规模死亡时，他们通常
选择拒绝替猪只做病毒检测
A farmer surnamed Zhao, who raises a herd in Henan province, said local
officials told him as much when they resisted recording the outbreak he
reported on his farm, which wiped out his herd.
“‘We haven’t had a single case of African swine fever. If I report it, we
have a case,’” Zhao recalled an official telling him. The local officials
could not be reached for comment and a fax seeking comment went unanswered.
“我们这边没有任何非洲猪瘟疫情”赵姓农民说：“如果我举报我们这边其实有案例
，通常无法联系官员、也没办法得到任何回应”
When the coronavirus hit, Chinese authorities reacted with a push to reassure
the public that all was well. The first reported death from the virus, also
known as SARS-CoV-2, came on Jan. 9 - a 61-year-old man in Wuhan. In the
following days, Chinese authorities said that the virus was under control and
not widely transmissible.
当武汉肺炎爆发，中国当局也做了相同反应，向大家保证一切都很好。
根据报导，在一月九日，第一例死亡为武汉一名61岁男子，原因为：
SARS二代（SAR-Cov-2）
但随后几天，中国当局表示该病毒可以控制、且不会广泛传播
The assurances came despite a lack of reliable data and testing capacity in
Wuhan. Testing kits for the disease were not distributed to some of Wuhan’s
hospitals until about Jan. 20, an official at the Hubei Provincial Centre for
Disease Control and Prevention (Hubei CDC) told Reuters. Before then, samples
had to be sent to a laboratory in Beijing for testing, a process that took
three to five days to get results, according to Wuhan health authorities.
尽管武汉缺乏可靠的数据和筛检能力，但仍取得了保证。
湖北省疾病控制中心一名官员告诉路透社：“该病毒的检测试剂直到一月20日
才分发到武汉的一些医院”
“在此之前，样品必须先送到北京的实验室进行测试，这一过程必须三到五天
才能得到结果”
During that gap, city hospitals reduced the number of people under medical
observation from 739 to 82, according to data from Wuhan health authorities
compiled by Reuters, and no new cases were reported inside China.
在这段期间内，路透社编译武汉市卫生部门的数据显示，程式医院将接受筛检的
人数从739人减少到82人，并且在中国没有新的病例报告
China’s top leadership has dramatically ramped up the public-health response
since its early missteps. Beijing built new hospitals in days to treat the
sick and launched an unprecedented blockade of the disease epicenter on Jan.
23, first quarantining Wuhan’s 11 million residents at home, then suspending
transport in all major cities of Hubei province, home to about 60 million
people.
由于在疫情扩散早期的失误，终于造成中国最高领导人对于公共卫生的反应，
北京当局这才赶紧决定建立新的病院，并且在一月二十三日对于疾病进行空前
的封城举动。首先对于武汉1100万居民进行隔离、并且暂停了湖北省内所有主要
城市的交通，该省有约6000万人
Still, the initial attempts to tightly control information left many people
unaware of the risks and unable to take precautions that might have prevented
infection - and the suppressing of news and commentary continues today. Wuhan
authorities reprimanded eight people they accused of spreading “illegal and
false” information about the disease. One of them, 34-year-old doctor Li
Wenliang, later died from coronavirus, triggering an angry backlash on social
media.
尽管如此，最初严格管控信息，仍然使很多人不了解风险，而无法采取有效的
防疫措施。如今，对于新闻和消息的压制仍在继续！！！
武汉当时处罚了“散播谣言的八个人”
其中一名，34岁的李文亮医师，后来就死于武汉肺炎，他的死亡引发社群网站
一些强烈不满
Some critical posts were allowed during a brief and unusual period of online
openness in late January. But Beijing’s censors - the Cyberspace
Administration of China (CAC) - have since cracked down on posts about Li and
other information that authorities deem negative, according to CAC censorship
orders sent to online news outlets and seen by Reuters. One CAC notice
ordered online outlets to guard against “harmful information.” Another
ordered them not to “push any negative story.”
在一月下旬短暂且不寻常的开放期间，允许发布一些关键文章。
但是北京的和谐组织the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)
下达强烈的审查命令。
自此之后，一切和谐，一些骂政府、对政府不利得信息，以及关于李文亮
的帖子迅速遭到删除。
一条通知命令下来，要求各网站防范"有害信息"、以及"不要发表任何负面消息"
UNREPORTED OUTBREAKS <本段基本在讲非洲猪瘟，就不翻译了>
Beijing had years to prepare for African swine fever. Veterinarians have
frequently warned Chinese authorities of the risks since the disease started
spreading through the Caucasus region in 2007.
Pigs infected by the virus initially suffer high fever, loss of appetite and
diarrhea. Then their skin turns red as internal hemorrhaging starts and their
organs swell, leading to death in as little as a week.
With no vaccine or cure available for the disease, experts recommend that
infected pigs and others housed in the same barn are culled, with the
carcasses either burned or buried to prevent further infection. Farms,
equipment and vehicles that could be contaminated need to be thoroughly
cleaned and disinfected.
The first case in China was discovered on Aug. 1, 2018, on a farm near
Shenyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Just two weeks later, the
virus was found more than 1,000 kilometers to the south in pigs bought by the
country’s top pork processor, WH Group(0288.HK), from another northeastern
province, Heilongjiang. It took Beijing another two weeks to block pig
exports from the whole region, and that and other transport restrictions were
poorly enforced, said Johnson and other industry experts. WH Group declined
to comment.
One factor behind the epidemic: Chinese consumers prefer fresh pork -
straight from the slaughterhouse, rather than chilled. This means hundreds of
thousands of live pigs are moved long distances every day to supply
processors in major cities. That mass movement spread the disease
relentlessly.
Over the first four months of the outbreak, Beijing reported swine-fever
cases almost daily as the virus spread from the northeast down through
central China, west into Sichuan, and to the huge province of Guangdong by
year-end. Veterinarians believe the virus spread quickly because it can
survive for weeks on dirty farm equipment or livestock trucks.
And yet gaps in counting and tracking the pig disease have been routine
across China. Reuters found a striking absence of reported outbreaks in some
of the nation’s most productive pork regions.
For instance, almost none of the reported outbreaks have come from the major
hog-raising provinces of Hebei, Shandong and Henan. The three contiguous
northern provinces were the source of some 20% of the 700 million pigs China
slaughtered in 2017. Many came from backyard farms, which make up a large
part of China’s industry and have proven fertile breeding grounds for the
disease. Yet each of the three provinces has reported just a single case of
African swine fever, despite widespread anecdotal reports of outbreaks there
that industry sources believe killed millions of pigs.
Neither Shandong nor Henan authorities responded to requests for comment.
Hebei’s department of agriculture said it had “strictly reported and
verified the epidemic” and that the disease situation was currently “stable.
”
Six Henan farmers told Reuters they reported outbreaks during late 2018 and
the first half of 2019. In some cases, local authorities helped deal with
dead pigs, they said, but never tested for the virus.
That’s what happened when Wang Shuxi, a farmer in Henan’s Gushi County,
lost more than 400 pigs in March 2019. Wang said he had no doubt that his
pigs had African swine fever, even though authorities never tested them - and
he couldn’t test them himself, because Beijing did not permit the commercial
sale of disease test kits at the time.
His pigs showed telltale symptoms of the disease.
“The whole body went red,” he said. He injected the animals with an
anti-fever medication to no avail. “At the start, they didn’t eat, and even
after injections, it kept returning,” he said. “If you can’t cure it, you
know it’s swine fever.”
Provincial and county governments had strong incentives to avoid verifying
and reporting outbreaks because of Beijing’s rules on compensating farmers,
said Huang Yanzhong, specialist in health governance with the Council on
Foreign Relations in New York.
Under an African swine fever contingency plan drawn up in 2015, Beijing
ordered the culling of all pigs on farms where the disease is found and on
every farm within a three-kilometer radius. The central government raised
compensation from 800 yuan ($115) to 1,200 yuan for every pig culled in 2018.
Beijing typically promised to provide between 40% and 80% of the money,
depending on the province. Localities would fund the rest.
In April 2019, the national agriculture ministry said the central government
had allocated 630 million yuan to cull 1.01 million pigs to contain the
disease. But that money either wasn’t sufficient or regularly did not get
paid out, farmers told Reuters. None of about a dozen farmers who told
Reuters they tried to report outbreaks said they had received the promised
1,200 yuan for each pig.
Many got nothing. Wang, the Gushi County farmer, said that almost a year
after his pigs died, he has received no recompense. Gushi County officials
could not be reached for comment.
Many farmers, eager to salvage value from their herds, have resorted to
sending their pigs to slaughter at the first sign of illness - thereby
thrusting the virus into the human food supply. The swine fever virus does
not threaten people. But its presence in meat - where it can survive for
weeks - creates a cycle of infection because many backyard farmers feed pigs
with restaurant scraps that include pork.
Garbage feeding caused 23 outbreaks in 2018, Huang Baoxu, deputy director of
the China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, told reporters at a briefing
in November that year. His remarks were a rare instance where the central
government revealed findings about the spread of the hog virus. The center
declined to comment for this story.
Farmers visiting slaughterhouses dealing in sick pigs also likely picked up
the virus on their trucks or equipment, spreading it back to their farms,
Johnson said.
In the southern province of Guangxi, the disease raged through the spring of
2019 and early summer, several farmers told Reuters last year. Bobai County
was hit hard.
A Bobai farmer surnamed Huang said she lost almost 500 pigs during April and
May. She said she tried to report the diseased pigs to the local government
but was ignored. The official she spoke to by phone never came to her farm.
He told Huang that her pigs could not be saved - but that they didn’t have
African swine fever. His advice, she said: “hurry and sell the pigs while
they could be sold.”
Huang said she sold more than 30 pigs that she believed had the virus. They
looked healthy when she sold them, she said. Others sold obviously sick pigs
at very low prices. “Traders took all the pigs, including the sick ones - as
long as they could walk to the trucks,” she said.
Huang buried her dead pigs daily for weeks on a relative’s land. Others
simply dumped their dead pigs on the roadside or in the mountains, she said.
The government provided no help.
Eventually, in late May, Bobai County reported one pig dead from the disease,
official statistics show.
Authorities in Guangxi did not respond to a request for comment, and
officials in Bobai county’s agriculture bureau could not be reached.
Beijing’s agriculture ministry said in a statement that it had issued an
August 2019 order requiring punishments in situations where localities failed
to report outbreaks. The ministry said it meted out unspecified discipline to
more than 600 local personnel for what it called failures to manage the
disease that were uncovered in its investigations of problem areas.
The practice of processing infected hogs has persisted despite new rules from
Beijing in July that required slaughterhouses to test all batches of pigs for
the virus. The agriculture ministry said in January that 5% of the more than
2,000 samples taken from slaughterhouses in November tested positive for the
disease.
An Australian study in September found 48% of meat products confiscated from
Asian travelers arriving at its ports and airports contained the virus.
“It showed there’s an awful lot of unrevealed infection not being reported
to the authorities,” said Trevor Drew, director of the Australian Animal
Health Laboratory.
One such information gap is at the top of the industry - China’s large
corporate pig producers. They have also been hit hard by the disease, despite
taking more extensive measures than backyard farms to disinfect trucks and
require workers to change clothes and shower before and after shifts.
None of China’s top publicly traded producers have publicly announced any
swine fever outbreak, but executives of major hog producers acknowledged in
interviews with Reuters that their herds were hit by the disease.
Thai conglomerate C.P. Pokphand(0043.HK) , one of China’s leading pig
producers, has had swine-fever outbreaks on farms in Liaoning, Shandong,
Henan and Jiangsu provinces, Bai Shanlin, chief executive of China
operations, told Reuters in a rare admission by a listed firm. Executives at
three other listed companies, also among China’s top pig producers,
acknowledged outbreaks at several farms but declined to be identified.
None of the outbreaks that these large companies have confirmed to Reuters
were reported by Beijing, according to a Reuters review of the agriculture
ministry’s data on outbreaks.
By August 2019, a year after the first case was found in China, pork prices
had passed a record set back in 2016. And they were still climbing rapidly.
With a crucial national celebration approaching in October - the 70th
anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic - China’s top leaders
took note. Pork is a staple of Chinese cuisine, and rising meat production
has been among the many signature achievements in the Communist Party’s
decades-long drive to bring prosperity to China.
In a video conference that month with officials from all 34 provinces and
regions, Vice Premier Hu Chunhua issued a warning: Sufficient pork was vital
to people’s lives and the country’s stability. He called for the urgent
recovery of the herd as a key “political task.”
A raft of new production policies and incentives emerged from Beijing. And as
the provinces rallied to replenish the nation’s herd, reports of African
swine fever grew even more rare. Disease outbreaks reported by the
agriculture ministry have tailed off since August. In January, Agriculture
Minister Han Changfu said the situation has stabilized.
The government’s statistics are rife with contradictions, however. The
ministry has reported 163 outbreaks of African swine fever since August 2018
and said 1.19 million pigs have been culled, a fraction of 1% of China’s
total herd. Separate ministry data tracking the herd monthly show that, by
September 2019, the herd had shrunk by 41% from the prior year.
These official estimates of the decline are far too low, three major industry
suppliers told Reuters.
“It’s at least 60%,” said Johan de Schepper, managing director of Dutch
feed ingredients firm Agrifirm International. His assessment, based on sales
to about 100 large pig producers, echoed those of others in the industry.
The virus is still killing pigs nationwide and the herd may still be
shrinking, say farmers and industry suppliers. “Half of the herd was gone
before this winter, and I think half of the rest will be gone by the end of
the season,” said Johnson, the veterinarian, citing conversations with
clients from across China.
The problem: Some areas were hit with a second wave of the disease.
问题：某些地区正遭逢第二波疾病的侵袭
Henan province is among them, farmers told Reuters. Last year, about 60% of
Henan’s herd was wiped out, mainly in the densely farmed areas in the south
and west of the province, analysts at Guotai Junan Securities wrote in an
internal memo seen by Reuters. Recently, the memo noted, the virus has moved
through east Henan, taking out another 20%.
养猪户告诉路透社，河南省就是其一。Guotai Junan 分析师在路透社看到的一份
内部备忘录写到：去年，河南省约有60％的猪群被扑杀，主要是该省南部、以及西
部人口密集区域。备忘录指出：最近猪瘟已经通过河南东部传播，又消灭了20％
The vicious disease ruined Zhao, the farmer in central China’s Henan
province. The virus struck in October, causing high fever, internal bleeding,
vomiting and diarrhea in his pigs. Just two survived. The other 196 died in a
week.
非洲猪瘟冲击著河南省的赵姓猪农，该病毒在十月爆发，导致猪只发高烧、
内出血、呕吐以及腹泻。只有两只猪存活下来，其他196只猪都在一周内死亡
When Zhao tried to report the outbreak to the county veterinary authority, he
said, officials strongly encouraged him to keep quiet. A local official
reminded him of the national mandate to cull all pigs within three kilometers
of an infected farm. That could spell disaster for his neighbors if Zhao
spoke up.
当赵姓养猪户试图将疫情报告给县兽医局，官员们强烈鼓励他保持沉默。
一名当地官员提醒他：“国家有义务扑杀在感染农场三公里内所有猪只，
如果赵说出实情，那他的邻居都会被影响。”
“If it’s found to be African swine fever, people nearby will have to stop
raising pigs,” Zhao recalled a local official telling him. Zhao decided
against filing a report to protect his neighbors, he told Reuters on a recent
visit to his farm.
“如果发现是非洲猪瘟，附近的人将不得不停止养猪”赵回应说：
“在最近一次访问他的农场时，他决定不停交报告、来保护他的邻居”
Further up the political hierarchy, the deputy governor of Henan province was
quoted by the provincial agriculture bureau as saying in December that Henan
had been free of the disease for 14 months, after a single reported case in
September 2018. The provincial government did not respond to requests for
comment.
在政治等级更高的地方，河南省副省长在2019年12月曾援引农业厅的话：在2018年
九月报告一起病例后，河南省已经病了14个月，但省政府并没有回应相关意见
The disinformation game continues. Zhao says that when county officials came
by his farm in January, they recorded that he still had 180 pigs. In fact, he
said, he had just the two hogs that survived the October outbreak.
虚假的信息游戏仍然在持续，赵姓人士说：
“当县府官员一月份来到他的农场时，他们记录他仍然有180只猪
实际上，他只有两只猪幸存下来”
“The country is being kept in the dark,” he said.
他说：“这个国家一直处在黑暗之中”