Piglets imported from UK for NE under quarantine

New Delhi: After human beings now high quality pure breed piglets imported from United Kingdom for the North East have been put under quarantine in New Delhi because of African swine fever in the region. Piglets imported from the UK by the National Livestock Mission (NLM) for the Northeastern states, have been kept in quarantined at the Animal Quarantine and Certification Service center at Kapashera in New Delhi since for highly infectious African swine fever. The fever has caused deaths of hundreds of pigs in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and states like Meghalaya have banned purchase of pork from these two states. The pure breed large white Yorkshire and pure breed Landrace pigs of UK are of very high quality compared to the local breed in many respects. Animal resource experts in North East suspect that the highly contagious disease came to the region from neighbouring Tibet in China through Arunachal Pradesh. But authorities are waiting for confirmatory reports from the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases in Bhopal. These quality piglets were supposed to be distributed in five Northeastern States — Tripura, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland. Assam and Arunachal Pradesh had no pig breeding policy when the initiative to import the piglets from the UK was undertaken by the NLM.