Risk Factors of African Swine Fever in Domestic Pigs of the Samara Region, Russian Federation

Abstract

African swine fever (ASF) is an incurable viral disease of domestic and wild pigs. A large-scale spread of ASF began in Eurasia in 2007 and has affected territories from Belgium to the Far East, occurring as both local- and regional-level epidemics. In 2020, a massive ASF epidemic emerged in the southeastern region of European Russia in the Samara Oblast and included 41 outbreaks of ASF in domestic pigs and 40 cases in wild boar. The Samara Oblast is characterized by a relatively low density of wild boar (0.04–0.05 head/km2) and domestic pigs (1.1–1.3 head/km2), with a high prevalence of small-scale productions (household farms). This study aims to understand the driving forces of the disease and perform a risk assessment for this region using complex epidemiological analyses. The socioeconomic and environmental factors of the ASF outbreak were explored using Generalized Linear Logistic Regression, where ASF infection status of the Samara Oblast districts was treated as a response variable. Presence of the virus in a district was found to be most significantly (p < 0.05) associated with the importation of live pigs from ASF-affected regions of Russia (OR = 371.52; 95% CI: 1.58–87290.57), less significantly (p < 0.1) associated with the density of smallholder farms (OR = 2.94; 0.82–10.59), volume of pork products' importation from ASF-affected regions of Russia (OR = 1.01; 1.00–1.02), summary pig population (OR = 1.01; 0.99–1.02), and insignificantly (p > 0.1) associated with presence of a common border with an ASF-affected region (OR = 89.2; 0.07–11208.64). No associations were found with the densities of pig and wild boar populations. The colocation analysis revealed no significant concentration of outbreaks in domestic pigs near cases in wild boar or vice versa. These results suggest that outbreaks notified in low biosecurity household farms were mainly associated with the transportation and trade of pigs and pork products from ASF-affected regions of Russia. The findings underline the importance of taking into account animal transportation data while conducting future studies to develop a risk map for the region and the rest of European Russia.