Siyensikat S05 EP13: African Swine Fever: Bioassets
Once a pig tests positive for African Swine Fever (ASF), all the other pigs within a one-kilometer distance shall be culled. This is the preventive measure of the Department of Agriculture to mitigate the spread of the disease. As a result, small-time hog raisers suffer due to income losses and loans.
To address this, a scientific solution on wheels developed by BioAssets Corporation and funded by the Department of Science and Technology was deployed to different parts of the country in order to boost ASF surveillance. The mobile biocontainment laboratory can travel to communities, provide detection kits, and process batch samples in four to five hours, allowing them to release the results within the day. With this, there will be no need to kill other pigs. Authorities will now be able to detect which one is infected.
