Officials and witnesses reported heavy damage and fatalities dozens of miles from the epicenter, 7.4 miles northeast of Saint-Louis du Sud, where the temblor struck at 8:29 a.m. At least 29 have been reported killed, with number of fatalities expected to rise.

Government officials, relief agencies and representatives from the United Nations were still assessing the damage, including via reconnaissance flights over southern and western parts of the country, as a wave of aftershocks continued to hit the island nation. But the sheer force of the temblor and a climbing death toll suggested a devastating new tragedy in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, which has lurched from crisis to crisis for years.

The disaster struck a month of the assassination of the president, leaving a hobbled, interim government in charge of a country so wracked by gang violence and a collapsing rule of law that observers have dubbed it Somalia in the Caribbean.

Now, 11 years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that claimed more than 220,000 lives, Haitians were again dealing with crushed bodies, collapsed buildings and overwhelmed local hospitals.

Ralph Simon, a radio station owner in Jeremie, a city of 30,000 in the Haitian southwest, said many homes and buildings had been leveled or damaged, including a local church. He said he saw two corpses in the rubble. “The impact of this is huge,” he said. “I was still in bed with my children and my wife. My wife had a heart attack, and I had to save her life. . . . There’s damage to houses. People are crying.”

Images on social media and witnesses portrayed scenes of devastation from collapsed structures, with officials saying residents were pouring into ill-equipped local hospitals, toting the injured in cars and the beds of pickup trucks. Neighbors aided rescue workers, trying to lift rubble and knock down walls to reach the stranded.

Haiti’s civil protection agency says at least 29 people killed in earthquake, according to the Associated Press. Preliminary disaster modeling from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and thousands of fatalities.

Silvera Guillaume, civil protection coordinator in the coastal city of Les Cayes, said the community’s resources were being overwhelmed.

“It’s a dire situation, people died. There are people right now under the rubble,” Guillaume said. “We deployed first responders to go and remove rubble, but we do not have enough first responders.”

Améthyste Arcélius, administrator of Immaculate Conception Hospital — the largest in Les Cayes — said that its facilities could not cope with the wounded and that it was in “desperate” need of personnel and medicines.

“There are lots of victims,” Arcélius said. “The hospital needs emergency drugs, health professionals of all categories. Lots of people are coming. The hospital is flooded with victims. We are issuing a call for help.”

At 8:29 a.m., Jabin Phontus, a 23-year-old agronomy student, said he felt his family home in Les Cayes begin to quake.

“I could see the walls breaking, it was scary,” he said by phone. “I took my sister and ran.”

His mother and brother also escaped their five-room home as it crumbled, leaving them scraped by falling debris.

“The house is partially destroyed, some walls are still up, but we can’t sleep inside,” he said. “We don’t know where to go now. We are seeking shelter. A lot of houses in the neighborhood are destroyed.”

As he spoke, he said a group of people near him were “trying to break down a wall to get to someone inside” a house.

Christy Delafield, spokesperson for the charity Mercy Corps, said the group was moving to mobilize a team to the area, but relief workers face logistical challenges. The main road to the area runs through gang infested territories just south of Port-au-Prince, leaving aid groups to focus on access by air. But the regional airport in Les Cayes is a rural airstrip with limited capacity, and was already being overwhelmed.

“We saw a similar situation with Hurricane Dorian” that struck the Bahamas in 2019, Delafield said. “There isn’t a lot of capacity in that area to handle assistance.”

Muhammad Bizimana, assistant country director for Care Haiti, said his organization was also facing logistical challenges, and was having to rely on “local staff” for assessments in the hardest hit areas, given the risks of traveling over land through gang-controlled regions south of Port-au-Prince.

“We’re exploring maritime transport,” he said.

Shelters for untold numbers homeless — especially in denser urban areas in the south and west — remained an immediate priority, he said.

But longer term, the quake had the potential to worsen a hunger crisis in the country. He said he had received reports of crops in the south destroyed by landslides in the aftermath of the earthquake.

“This has not been a good year for Haiti,” Bizimana said. “It’s one crisis after another.”

The reported magnitude from the USGS was greater than the catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit seven miles west of Port-au-Prince in 2010, which resulted in more than 220,000 casualties. The quake on Saturday struck farther away from the densely populated capital than the one in 2010, but the USGS noted that people in the most heavily hit areas largely reside in poorly constructed dwellings that are vulnerable to earthquake shaking.

The earthquake is set to deepen a humanitarian crisis in a country torn apart by hunger, poverty and violence that has never fully recovered from the 2010 quake. After the devastation of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, 1.4 million Haitians required humanitarian assistance.

U.N. agencies say 46 percent of the population is already experiencing acute or severe food insecurity — among the highest in the world. In the past, aid agencies have faced massive hurdles to transport aid south of the capital, given the open gang warfare on National Road 2 — the nation’s major western and southern artery.

Haiti also entered a new period of political instability in the aftermath of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July.

Jose Luis Fernandez, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Haiti, said portions of southern Haiti were already facing “severe and acute” food shortages.

The earthquake “will worsen the food insecurity situation in the country, especially in areas of the south. There are pictures of many roads and bridges that have been destroyed. This is going to disrupt the flow of food.”

Haiti reeled from the quake even as the nation looked to the east with trepidation, with Tropical Storm Grace bearing down on the island nation. The storm, with maximum sustained winds of 45 miles per hour, was poised to arrive sometime on Monday, running a risk of heavy rainfall.

Faiola reported from Miami.

Haiti buries a president, but its long-term crisis lives on Haiti has a tragic history of disasters The long legacy of the U.S. occupation of Haiti

© Provided by The Washington Post

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/at-least-29-dead-in-haiti-in-wake-of-7-2-magnitude-earthquake/ar-AANjOtE?ocid=msedgntp

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Health officials in Hanoi, Vietnam, spray disinfectant on a dead pig at a farm before burying it in an isolated quarantined pit to stop the spread of African swine fever. Manan VatsyanyanaAFP/Getty Images

An outbreak of African swine fever, a highly contagious disease that’s been called “pig Ebola,” is ravaging Asia’s pig industry with no signs of letting up.

The current outbreak of the virus, which kills almost all animals it infects, began in China in August. Since then, some 22 percent of the country’s pig herd has been lost to the disease and to culling, Christine McCracken, an animal protein expert at Rabobank, told Vox.

African swine fever is also now spreading in several countries neighboring China, including Mongolia, Russia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The map below shows current outbreaks in Asia, as reported to the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE.

The disease, which was discovered a century ago in Kenya, is particularly deadly to pigs because it spreads easily and there is no treatment or vaccine. The only way for pig producers to prevent it is to kill all animals that have been infected or potentially exposed, or to put strict biosecurity measures in place.

Officials in China have tried in vain to get the outbreak under control to protect the country’s roughly 440 million pigs, which make up more than half of all pigs on earth. So far, it says it has culled 1.2 million pigs, putting thousands of small producers out of business. McCracken and others say that is a significant underestimate.

By the end of the year, she estimates China may lose as many as 200 million pigs. That’s an astonishingly high number, considering that a single pig can produce 200 pounds of food. It’s also remarkable when you compare it to the 250 million poultry in 63 countries that were culled following the outbreak of avian flu in China in 1996.

This African swine fever outbreak, in other words, is much worse than that avian flu outbreak in terms of livestock losses. “It’s historic; there’s never been anything like this in the history of modern animal production,” said McCracken. “And it’s a frightening situation only in that there is no current control.”

Though China is the epicenter and the worst-affected country, Vietnam has also been forced to cull 2 million of its 30 million pigs, according to Reuters. And tourists have brought the disease into several countries in Europe, including Poland and Romania, where it’s spreading among wild boar.

“This is the biggest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had on the planet,” Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at City University of Hong Kong and expert on African swine fever, told the Guardian. “It makes the foot and mouth disease and BSE [mad cow disease] outbreaks pale in comparison to the damage that is being done.”

African swine fever can’t be transmitted from pigs to humans and is not a food safety issue. But its recent spread in Asia is becoming a major economic problem for the region, where thousands of farmers raise pigs in their backyard and rely on them for their livelihood. “It’s a pretty fragile industry with a lot of potential risk,” McCracken said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has said the disease could continue to spread across Southeast Asia. Thailand is now on “red alert,” the Guardian reported.

Before the current outbreak, veterinarians had been warning that the virus was a significant threat to the global pig industry. “Vaccine development against ASF has been hampered by large gaps in knowledge concerning ASFV infection and immunity,” according to a March 2018 article in The Veterinary Journal.

The attempts to control the current outbreak in Asia have failed for a number of reasons, including “rampant smuggling of pork products,” according to researchers writing in February in the journal Antiviral Research:

New outbreaks are still ongoing due to complex factors, including difficult control of long borders, frequent exchanges of personnel and products with affected countries, rampant smuggling of pork products, large populations and high densities of domestic pigs and wild boars, high numbers of backyard and small pig farms with poor biosecurity, difficult control of long-distance, trans-region transportation of live pigs and pork products, and the difficulty of early detection of ASF, due to confusion of early clinical signs with other diseases.

So far, there’s no sign that African swine fever has infected pigs or wild hogs in the United States. But the US Department of Agriculture said in May that it would begin testing for the virus to keep the disease out. “The more countries that it’s in, the more risk there is that it can spread globally through travelers carrying processed meat that’s been infected,” said McCracken.

In an email to Vox, Pfeiffer added, “Any pig producing country in the world is at risk, and how high that depends on each country’s border inspection and veterinary service capability and the structure of each country’s pig industry.”

While the outbreak hasn’t significantly affected the price of pork, eventually the massive losses in China and Vietnam may impact consumers around the world.

“Prices are still at acceptable levels because China still has inventories of frozen pork,” says McCracken. “But eventually those inventories will be worked down later this year and prices will move higher. It will be global.”

McDonald’s, which sells a lot of bacon, said it’s already feeling the impact. “African swine fever hurts us a little on the pork,” McDonalds CEO Steve Easterbrook said in a recent interview with CNBC. “That limits the movements of pork and pushes it up here in the US.”

Source: https://www.vox.com/2019/6/6/18655460/china-african-swine-fever-pig-ebola

The post “Pig Ebola” is spreading uncontrollably in China and Vietnam first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

An unprecedented outbreak of African swine fever, a highly contagious disease that’s been called “pig Ebola,” is ravaging Asia’s pig industry with no signs of letting up.

The current outbreak of the virus, which kills almost all infected animals, began in China in August. Since then, some 22 percent of the country’s pig herd has been lost to the disease and to culling, Christine McCracken, an animal protein expert at Rabobank, told Vox. African swine fever is also now spreading in several countries neighboring China, including Mongolia, Russia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The map below shows current outbreaks in Asia, as reported to the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE.

African swine fever, which was discovered a century ago in Kenya, is particularly deadly to pigs because it spreads easily and there is no treatment or vaccine. The only way for pig producers to prevent it is to kill all animals that have been infected or potentially exposed, or to put strict biosecurity measures in place.

Officials in China have tried in vain to get the outbreak under control to protect the country’s roughly 440 million pigs, which make up more than half of all pigs on earth. So far, it says it has culled 1.2 million pigs, putting thousands of small producers out of business. McCracken and others say that is a significant underestimate.

By the end of the year, she estimates China will be forced to cull more than 200 million pigs. That’s an astonishingly high number, considering that a single pig can produce 200 pounds of food. It’s also remarkable when you compare it to the 250 million poultry in 63 countries that were culled following the outbreak of avian flu in China in 1996.

This African swine fever outbreak, in other words, is much worse than that avian flu outbreak in terms of livestock losses. “It’s historic; there’s never been anything like this in the history of modern animal production,” said McCracken. “And it’s a frightening situation only in that there is no current control.”

Though China is the epicenter and the worst-affected country, Vietnam has also been forced to cull 2 million of its 30 million pigs, according to Reuters. And tourists have brought the disease into several countries in Europe, including Poland and Romania, where it’s spreading among wild boar.

“This is the biggest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had on the planet,” Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at City University of Hong Kong and expert on African swine fever, told the Guardian. “It makes the foot and mouth disease and BSE [mad cow disease] outbreaks pale in comparison to the damage that is being done.”

African swine fever can’t be transmitted from pigs to humans and is not a food safety issue. But its recent spread in Asia is becoming a major economic problem for the region, where thousands of farmers raise pigs in their backyard and rely on them for their livelihood. “It’s a pretty fragile industry with a lot of potential risk,” McCracken said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has said the disease could continue to spread across Southeast Asia. Thailand is now on “red alert,” the Guardian reported.

Before the current outbreak, veterinarians had been warning that the virus was a significant threat to the global pig industry. “Vaccine development against ASF has been hampered by large gaps in knowledge concerning ASFV infection and immunity,” according to a March 2018 article in The Veterinary Journal.

The attempts to control the current outbreak in Asia have failed for a number of reasons, including “rampant smuggling of pork products,” according to researchers writing in February in the journal Antiviral Research:

New outbreaks are still ongoing due to complex factors, including difficult control of long borders, frequent exchanges of personnel and products with affected countries, rampant smuggling of pork products, large populations and high densities of domestic pigs and wild boars, high numbers of backyard and small pig farms with poor biosecurity, difficult control of long-distance, trans-region transportation of live pigs and pork products, and the difficulty of early detection of ASF, due to confusion of early clinical signs with other diseases.

So far, there’s no sign that African swine fever has infected pigs in the United States. But the US Department of Agriculture said in May that it would begin testing for the virus to keep the disease out. “The more countries that it’s in, the more risk there is that it can spread globally through travelers carrying processed meat that’s been infected,” said McCracken.

And while the outbreak hasn’t significantly affected the price of pork, eventually the massive losses in China and Vietnam may impact consumers around the world.

“Prices are still at acceptable levels because China still has inventories of frozen pork,” says McCracken. “But eventually those inventories will be worked down later this year and prices will move higher. It will be global.”

McDonald’s, which sells a lot of bacon, said it’s already feeling the impact. “African swine fever hurts us a little on the pork,” McDonalds CEO Steve Easterbrook said in a recent interview with CNBC. “That limits the movements of pork and pushes it up here in the US.”

Source: https://www.vox.com/2019/6/6/18655460/china-african-swine-fever-pig-ebola

The post “Pig Ebola” is spreading uncontrollably in China and Vietnam first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.