A Possible Lab Leak in Spain Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Biosafety

African swine fever virus (ASFV) causes fatal disease in wild and domestic pigs.

Thankfully, ASFV does not cause disease in people, but it can be economically devastating for commercial pork producers. Spain is currently experiencing an outbreak of African swine fever in wild boars, its first since 1994.

As a threat to Spain’s $10 billion annual pork export industry, local authorities are taking this outbreak extremely seriously. Yet, it illustrates a phenomenon with far higher stakes than Jamón Ibérico: risking another deadly human pandemic.

There are no current outbreaks of ASFV in France or Portugal, so the virus did not walk into Spain in a wild boar. Pigs don’t swim the Mediterranean, and, famously, pigs don’t fly. So where did the infection come from? The initial hypothesis, as implausible as it may seem, was that a wild pig ate a ham sandwich that had been discarded by a long-range truck driver. African swine fever virus can survive in processed pork, and there is ASFV elsewhere in Europe.

When the viral genetics were analyzed, the Spanish boars were found to be infected with a strain of ASFV that is a match to the Georgia-2007 strain. Significantly, this strain is the “reference strain”, used in research labs, and is not associated with current African swine fever infections in Europe.