China battles a deadly virus that threatens its pork industry

Today's expression: To spell out
Explore more: Lesson #163
June 13, 2019:

The African Swine Fever, a deadly virus that affects pigs but is harmless to humans, is sweeping through China's pig population. The virus is difficult to contain, as it spreads quickly and often invisibly. Despite culling millions of pigs, China is struggling to contain the virus. Plus, learn English phrasal verb "to spell out."

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China has had to slaughter millions of pigs as it desperately tries to control the deadly African Swine Fever

Welcome in to this Thursday edition of Plain English, the best podcast for learning English through current events. I’m Jeff; the producer is JR and you are listening to episode 163. That means you can find the transcript of today’s program at PlainEnglish.com/163. It is an honor to have you with us each and every Monday and Thursday. It really is.

Coming up on today’s program: a virus is sweeping through China’s pig population and it threatens the country’s massive pork industry. Spain once faced this exact same virus; it took them 35 years to eradicate it. Not good news. In the second part of the episode, we’ll talk about the English phrasal verb “spell out.” And it’s Thursday, so we have a song of the week, selected by JR, the producer.

Before we get started, I wanted to remind you of our new partner, IELTS Advantage. They are the authority on the IELTS test and they are offering Plain English listeners a free IELTS prep course called IELTS Fundamentals. You can access that by going to PlainEnglish.com/IELTS .


Virus threatens China’s pig population

China and other Asian countries are suffering from a devastating outbreak of African Swine Fever, a deadly disease that affects pigs. China is a pork-loving nation that is home to about 440 million pigs, about half the entire world’s population. Millions of pigs have been slaughtered in an attempt to control the spread of the virus, but it hasn’t been enough. The disease is now in Mongolia, Vietnam and North Korea, and may have already spread to other neighboring countries.

There is no vaccine for the disease and there is no way to treat an infected pig; almost all infected animals die of the disease. The disease does not affect humans—even if they eat meat from an infected animal—so it’s not a human health concern. But the pork industry in China is likely to take a hit: China is expected to raise 20 percent fewer hogs this years than last. This epidemic is already vastly larger than the avian flu epidemic that struck poultry in the 1990s and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain in 2001.

ASF, as the virus is known for short, has several properties that cause it to spread quickly. First, an individual hog doesn’t show symptoms of ASF until it has been infected for between five and fifteen days. But during that entire time, the animal is contagious, meaning it can spread the disease to others. Another deadly property of ASF is the fact that it’s so easy to spread from one animal to another. I don’t think I need to spell out all the ways in which a virus can spread in a pig farm: I’ll let you use your imagination. The virus is also hardy. That means it can survive in harsh conditions. It can live in dirt on truck tires and spread that way; in fact, one study showed that about half of new infections come from vehicles or from workers’ clothing or equipment.

The virus doesn’t only affect domesticated pigs, either. Wild boars are pigs, but in the wild—pretty much the same animal, just not part of a farm, in other words. And when the wild pig population gets infected, they spread it from farm to farm. This was news to me, but wild pigs have a fair amount of contact with farmed pigs. This is bad news. You can imagine if this were just a virus that were contained to farmed animals, you could stop the spread of the virus more easily by encouraging farmers to work together. But with wild boar acting as carrier pigeons for the disease, it can spread quickly from farm to farm before anyone knows what happens. Not only that, but ticks can carry and spread the disease, too.

So far, we’ve just talked about the scientific reasons why ASF spreads so much, but there is a human component, too. You might not be surprised to learn that it has to do with money. When a herd is infected with this virus, there is only one thing to do: cull the herd. That means, crudely, to kill the animals. It’s not fun to think about, but it is just a fact of life and a fact of modern farming. The hogs, though, are the farmer’s business, so no farmer wants to cull his entire herd and get no money.

A responsible government will pay farmers to cull their herds. That is the only way to make sure that farmers actually do the responsible thing to stop the spread of the disease. This is a pretty standard procedure. The problem is if the government doesn’t pay enough for each culled hog. That is what people suspect is going on in China right now. What would happen if a farmer knew he wouldn’t get enough money for culling his herd? Well, let’s think about it. Pretend a farmer notices a single pig showing symptoms of ASF. The farmer is afraid that the virus is going to spread to his entire herd; in fact, it probably is already spreading. That farmer could hide the one sick hog and sell the entire rest of the herd to another, larger farm, all at once. If the hogs are still not showing symptoms, then the other farmer, the buyer, would be none-the-wiser. The infected hogs would be integrated into a much larger farm, and the virus would spread farther and farther. So that’s why it’s very important for the government to pay farmers the full value for culled hogs.

Officially, the Chinese government is paying for culled hogs, but some reports say that local governments are withholding payment. In other cases, farmers have been punished for having an outbreak in their farm.

ASF was once confined just to Africa. But in the late 1950s, it moved to Portugal from Angola, and slowly spread across Europe, starting in Spain in 1960 and then spreading gradually eastward.

It took Spain thirty-five years to completely eradicate ASF, and in the process the pig-farming industry in Europe matured and industrialized. No longer were most pigs raised by small farmers. New larger, industrialized farms implemented new testing procedures, lab techniques, and sanitary procedures. The virus is still in the island of Sardinia, in Italy; they’ve been trying for forty years to eradicate it there.

Scientists have been working on a vaccine for half a century, without much luck. The only promising effort at a vaccine caused grotesque side effects that were almost as bad as the disease itself.


Quick “hi” to a few listeners: Angelo in Milan has British boss at a company owned by an American, so he’s using English all the time. He started at the beginning and has already reached episode 100. He’ll probably hear this sometime in the fall! Good to have you with us Angelo. Also Heidi from Germany was listening to this program at the beach on the shores of the Red Sea in Egypt on her recent vacation. I think that’s amazing. Thanks for being with us Heidi.

If you’re studying for the IELTS exam, I hope you heard my message last week. If not, here’s a quick summary. We have a new partner at Plain English, and that is a company called IELTS Advantage, based in Ireland. It’s led by a very experienced English teacher and IELTS expert, Chris Pell, who has put lots and lots of informative videos on YouTube and coaches students on the IELTS exam. He has a free course online, which you can get at PlainEnglish.com/IELTS . This tells you all about the test, how to approach it, what skills you need, things like that. Don’t go in cold; don’t go into this test thinking you can just use your English and get your Band 7 or higher. Maybe you can, but that’s too risky. You need to prepare for the test. And Chris’s IELTS Fundamentals course is the best way to get started. PlainEnglish.com/IELTS. It’s totally free—a five-day course

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Expression: To spell out