Hawaii is not prepared for the looming threat of a possible epidemic among feral and domesticated pigs, state experts say.
Kim Kozuma, a deputy veterinary medical officer for the state Department of Agriculture, said the state is woefully underequipped to prevent an outbreak of any number of infectious diseases among livestock, pigs in particular.
The greatest concern, Kozuma said, is the possibility of the African swine fever virus making it to Hawaii’s shores.
The virus, she said, is highly contagious — not requiring any minimum viral load to take root in a host — and can linger for a long period without a host, allowing humans and other animals to inadvertently carry the virus to new places on their clothes and skin.
The African swine fever virus, or ASF, is also almost invariably fatal to pigs: Infected swine develop a fever, hemorrhages across the body and muscle tremors, and enter into a comatose state and die within a few days of infection.
“It’s basically Ebola for pigs,” Kozuma said, adding that if the virus gets a foothold in the state, it will be ineradicable.
While ASF cannot infect humans, its impacts to pigs would be economically disastrous for Hawaii.
“It wiped out billions of pigs in China,” Kozuma said. “They’ve had to change everything about how they raise pigs there. Now they’re raising them in controlled facilities with (high-efficiency particulate air filters).”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a Declaration of Extraordinary Emergency highlighting the enormous stakes of a potential ASF outbreak. If ASF is detected within domestic pigs in the lower 48 states, all inter- and intrastate transportation of domestic and feral pigs, alive or dead, will be frozen for 72 hours. It is unclear how much this action would cost.
With all this on the line, and with the virus having been detected in multiple Asian countries including China and Vietnam, Kozuma said the state needs to bolster its border policies to prevent any infected specimens from slipping into the state.
She said it’s possible ASF or other epidemic diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease, already have arrived on the Big Island and only by chance failed to spread.
But Kozuma added that the state DOA is understaffed and underfunded, and lacks the ability to enforce basic rules.
She said that in 2001, she was part of a task force responding to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom. Upon her return, she was required to quarantine in London for five days and burn all of her clothes before leaving the country, measures Hawaii doesn’t impose.
Even simple measures don’t exist where they could. In particular, she said, even though feeding feral pigs is a very effective way to hasten the spread of parasites or diseases among swine, there is no way for the DOA to impose penalties upon those who do it.
Both Hilo Councilwoman Jenn Kagiwada and North Kona Sen. Tim Richards said they have had preliminary meetings with Kozuma to discuss possible legislative solutions to sharpen the DOA’s teeth, but both said those discussions are in very early stages.
“We’ve still got to figure out who’s responsible (for managing feral animals),” Richards said. “Is it (the Department of Land and Natural Resources)? It’s a fuzzy area. We’ve seen feral populations grow substantially, but DLNR doesn’t want that job.”
Richards added the DOA’s budget is “a rounding error” compared to the overall state budget and that any concerted effort to improve biosecurity measures will require the state to allocate considerably more resources to the department.
“We have this expectation to increase local ag production, but we’re not giving them the resources,” Richards said.
Kagiwada, meanwhile, said that complaints about swine are frequent at her office, with several places in Hilo known to be more dangerous to drive in because of residents feeding pigs, which wander onto the roads.
“It’s been a question about how that is allowed for years,” Kagiwada said.
Pig trapper Abraham Antonio said people leaving pig carcasses on the side of the road is also unsafe, unseemly and unsanitary, allowing for the spread of parasitic worms among the swine.
While Antonio said he sees some pigs that appear underweight when he traps them, he added that it is impossible to tell whether they’re infected with parasites until the animals are cut open.
Antonio added that the state could be doing more to address the parasite problem, too.
In 2022, the state Legislature passed Act 315, which required the DLNR to recognize the importance of game animals as a food source, but the law hasn’t led to any additional resources for managing game animals, such as using bait stations to distribute deworming agents among pig populations.
Kozuma said the threat of ASF or other diseases would be devastating for trappers like Antonio. The 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in the U.K. saw more than 6 million cattle and sheep killed to prevent the spread of the disease, with a calamitous impact on the nation’s agriculture industry.
“People killed themselves over it,” Kozuma said. “They lost everything.
“I’ve been to mass eradications, I’ve seen thousands of animals slaughtered and burned. We do not want that here,” she concluded.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.