A preliminary study for the quest, retrieval, and disposal of wild boar cadavers at the onset of an african swine fever epidemic

ASF is a potentially panzootic viral pig disease, which has recently affected the Italian territory with multiple hotspots. According to the recent EU Regulation, immediate eradication measures must be taken as soon as it is detected. As no vaccine or drugs are available against ASF, preventive measures are crucial for disease management: in swine farms, these include depopulating, physically isolating vulnerable holdings, contact tracing of animals and related products, and enforcing biosecurity throughout the production chain. Outbreaks are managed by isolating the infected area, thus causing extremely harsh socioeconomic effects on both individual farms and downstream economies, exerted mainly by the restrictions applied on the commercialization of live swine and swine products. A cornerstone of ASF prevention and management is the early detection and removal of viral reservoirs: in Europe, this is mainly represented by the wild boar, whose management is considered crucial for disease control: the measures to be implemented include the active quest and removal of cadavers, an important demographic decrement, and the predisposition of an infrastructural network for collecting, sampling and disposing of carcasses and cadavers. Given the high resistance of ASFV, all these activities must be carried out observing stringent biosafety measures throughout a precise territorial compartmentalization, requiring high level skills, landscape expertise, coordination between different stakeholders, and the setup of an efficient operational hierarchy. The present work describes the setup of these measures in preparation of an ASF outbreak in Pordenone EDR (ex-province), northeast Italy, and the main aspects to be considered for an efficient management of wild boar and wild boar cadavers in case of ASF introduction. An overview of ASF ecology and targeted legislation is given, in a view to draft a comprehensive framework of ASF management in wild boar at an operational scale.