Dr. Giovanni Filippini, the former director of the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Sardegna, will take on the role of new extraordinary commissioner for the management of the African Swine Fever (ASF) emergency. Filippini, who just a month ago had been appointed head of the general directorate of animal health at the Ministry of Health, is now being called upon to contain the spread of a highly contagious and deadly disease affecting pigs and wild boar, which appears to be increasingly out of control. This situation is keeping the entire Italian pig farming sector on edge, given that the largest numbers of Italian pigs are concentrated in several provinces bordering the infection zones (primarily Parma and Brescia).
The previous commissioner, Dr. Vincenzo Caputo, had resigned at the end of July following the sudden resurgence of infections in Lombardy and Piedmont, which is being investigated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Pavia through the NAS of Cremona. Caputo had taken office on 25 February 2023, replacing Dr. Angelo Ferrari, who had in turn left the post in December 2022 following controversy over the inefficiency of the virus containment measures, particularly the management of the fencing designed to limit the spread of the disease.
Caputo’s resignation, however, while officially attributed to personal reasons, coincidentally occurred shortly after the negative assessment by the European Commission of Italy’s work in combating the epidemic. Despite government promises and over a year and a half of work by the commissioner’s office, the advance of the virus appears to continue, albeit slowly, but in an unstoppable manner. Confirming this, last July the first case of ASF in Tuscany was recorded, with the discovery of a dead wild boar that tested positive for the virus on the border with Liguria.
At the beginning of July, a team of experts from Germany, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, members of the EU-VET (Veterinary Emergency Team) of the European Commission, carried out a visit to Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, supported by local official veterinarians. The aim of this visit was to assess the progress made, identify areas requiring improvement and plan future actions to contain the spread of ASF.
Subsequently, during a meeting between the European Commission and member states, a report was presented that highlighted several critical issues in the measures adopted by Italy to contain ASF. In particular, the experts stressed the need for a unified and coordinated strategy, overcoming the limitations imposed by regional administrative divisions. The main critical issue highlighted is indeed the fragmented management of the epidemic, with each region or province implementing its own measures, often with minimal coordination with neighbouring areas. The importance of a coordinated and harmonised disease control strategy that takes into account the entire epidemiological situation in northern Italy was underlined.
Furthermore, the document emphasises that indiscriminate hunting of wild boar, repeatedly put forward as a solution by politicians, does not represent the optimal strategy for controlling ASF. Reducing the wild boar population to zero, as envisaged in certain areas of Lombardy with a high density of intensive livestock farms, is an unachievable and potentially counterproductive objective. The experts recommend instead focusing efforts on biosecurity measures for farms, as indiscriminate hunting could encourage the dispersal of infected animals into new areas, thereby increasing the risk of ASF spreading.
The 2023 epidemiological analysis, published in May by EFSA, confirmed that ASF recorded a significant increase in outbreaks across the European Union. In Italy, last year 16 cases were reported, leading to the culling of hundreds of pigs in the province of Pavia, with one case also in the Brescia area. This year, the virus has re-emerged in Liguria, Piedmont and Lombardy, with six new outbreaks recently identified in the provinces of Milan, Pavia, Novara and Piacenza. As a result, the health protocol requiring the culling of all pigs present in the affected establishments was triggered, with an estimated 15,000 animals involved. For this operation, electrocution was once again used, a method that was at the centre of controversy last year and for which we had also filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Pavia.
The picture that emerges from the European Commission’s investigation and from recent news is certainly not flattering. We trust that the new extraordinary commissioner will be able to draw lessons from the observations and critical issues highlighted, adopting a more coordinated strategy focused on biosecurity in order to effectively address the threat of ASF in Italy.