Another two suspected cases of swine fever have been found in Rome in the same area as the first one last week, sources said Monday.
The latest cases have been detected in the Insugherata Park, the Lazio regional health office said. The Italian capital has started installing nets against wild boar which have become ever more numerous and bothersome over recent months and years. Officials said an anti-swine fever plan was in the works.
Health Undersecretary Andrea Costa said a boar cull was “no longer to be put off” because of the way the animals are “increasingly invading our urban and peri-urban spaces”. The Rome cases are the first outside the area of the original outbreak in Liguria and Piedmont. African swine fever is a highly contagious and deadly viral disease affecting both domestic and feral swine of all ages. ASF is not a threat to human health and cannot be transmitted from pigs to humans. It is not a food safety issue. ASF is found in countries around the world.
Farm group CIA said “this Rome find turns the alarm into a national emergency”. In the area of the original outbreak between Liguria and Piedmont, three mores cases were detected Thursday bringing the total to 115 animals currently infected. Romans are “hostages to wild boar”, farm group Coldiretti Lazio chief David Granieri said Wednesday, citing the case of a woman attacked in the Italian capital by a herd of eight boar including six piglets. The presence of over 20,000 boar in Rome and its surrounding province, and more than 100,000 in the whole of Lazio, has brought about “an unacceptable and out of control situation,” said Granieri, citing over two million euros in damage wrought recently. The rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, citing the attack on the woman, said they would file a suit against Lazio regional authorities for “omissive crimes in the areas of safety, urban decorum and health”. Coldiretti, for its part, slammed the “total inertia” of the Roman wildlife agency, Roma Natura, “which is glaringly clear in their management of protected areas where there has been a proliferation of boar”. Rome city council is planning to curb boar invasions by building containment nets, barriers at access points, and the continual clean-up of the rubbish the animals root through for food. In Rome, a family of 12 wild boar strolled through traffic recently spurring a video that went viral on the Web in the latest in a slew of such sightings over the past few months. The boar were spotted wandering around near the Gemelli Hospital in the north of Rome.
Rangers said the animals were completely urbanised and were in no way afraid of pedestrians or the heavy traffic in the Italian capital. Also recently, a boar family was snapped outside a kindergarten in the Montemario district in another viral video. Such sightings have become quite common in the northern part of Rome. The boar were found roaming on the Via Trionfale, one of Rome’s biggest streets. On September 1 Rome’s former Mayor Virginia Raggi filed a criminal suit against the Lazio regional government over “the massive and uncontrolled” presence of wild boar in the Italian capital’s urban areas.
The boar invasion, said the 5-Star Movement (M5S) politician, was due to a failure by the regional government, which is led by Democratic Party (PD) former leader Nicola Zingaretti, to implement effective management plans for the animals. Raggi cited a 1992 law which says regions must “provide for the control of species of wild fauna even in areas where hunting is forbidden”. It was up to the regional government to capture the boar and let them back into the wild, she said. Another family of wild boar were caught on CCTV cameras roaming a central Rome street in search of food recently. The animals, which appeared to be unfazed by passing cars and wary pedestrians, were filmed in the central Via Fani, site of late Christian Democrat statesman Aldo Moro’s kidnapping in 1978. The mother and her piglets appeared to be very hungry as they rummaged through refuse, passersby said.
Italian farmers took to the streets in front of parliament and across the country in early July to protest what they say is an “invasion” by wild boars into farmland and cities all over Italy. Coldiretti said that during the COVID year the number of wild boar straying onto farms and roving the outskirts of Italian cities had risen by 15% to a record total of 2.3 million animals. Coldiretti published what it called a “tragic” toll of one incident caused by the boar every 48 hours in a year of COVID.
There had been 16 victims of wild boar incidents in the past year, and 215 people injured, Coldiretti said. The number of car crashes caused by the animals on Italian provincial roads had risen by 81% over the past 10 years, the farmers’ association said. Farmers, animal breeders and shepherds from all over Italy gathered in all of Italy’s 20 regional capitals starting in Rome where they rallied outside the parliament building, Montecitorio. They said they want to “stop a calamity that destroys crops, attacks animals, besieges stables and causes road accidents, with concrete dangers for farmers and citizens”.
A group of young farmers dressed up in boar costumes stopped MPs and explained to them the “emergency situation” they have to face each day. Other farmers brought fruit, salad ingredients and cereal crops that had been completely destroyed by boar. The protesters also held up life-size cut-outs of boar to show politicians how scary an encounter with the animals can be. They also waved banners reading “After COVID, the plague of boar”, “We sow, the boar reap”, “Let’s defend our land” and “Town and country united against wild boar”. Many city mayors came to Montecitorio, as well as ordinary citizens worried about what they called “a full-blown emergency”.
