Spain held African swine fever eradication exercise

Spain held a field simulation for African swine fever on November 10 and 11.
The exercise, which will involve the veterinary services of the Ministry of Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs, MARM, as well as those from the autonomous communities of Catalonia, Castile-Leon and Navarre, has been designed to review and verify the National and Autonomous emergency plans, control measures and the eradication of an ASF outbreak with a view to identifying improvements.
The simulation exercise has a number of specific objectives. These include evaluating the coordination between MARM and the autonomous communities when facing an immediate notification of an ASF outbreak in the European Union territory, and evaluating the coordination of some autonomous communities with provincial delegations, regional agricultural offices and the MARM.
In addition, the exercise will seek to evaluate the existence and/or the efficiency of some autonomous communities’ contingency plans for ASF, and evaluate the veterinary services capacity in some autonomous communities to identify the farms that may be affected by an ASF outbreak in the EU.
Some autonomous communities’ veterinary services will have their ability to send potentially ASF infected samples to a laboratory evaluated and the response of the national reference laboratory in case of reception of the potential ASF samples will also come under scrutiny.