Germany on alert as swine fever nears border

Sniffer dogs, drones and electrified fences: Germany is deploying a full array of defences to stop boars from bringing swine fever into the country and avert a disaster for its thriving pork industry. "The question is no longer if swine fever will come to Germany but when," Torsten Reinwald, a spokesman for Germany's hunting federation, told AFP. The virus is not harmful to human health but can cause deadly bleeding in domestic pigs and boars. The only way of getting rid of it is through mass culling at farms -- a nightmare for German farmers. Half of Germany's pork production of five million tons a year goes to foreign markets, making it Europe's biggest exporter of the meat. It is feared that even a single case could wreak havoc. "The probability that countries like China impose a total import ban is very high," said Sarah Dhem, a representative of Germany's meat products association. Dhem gave the example of a total Chinese import ban following a few outbreaks in Belgium last year. Losses could run into billions of euros and the European market would be flooded with cut-price pork. Farmers first began to worry when swine fever was identified at a pig farm in western Poland in...