Pig Disease in China Worries the World

Among the possible conditions for the sample sharing that are being discussed: that patents and royalties from the development of vaccines and treatments remain the property of China. "There has been a feeling that in the past, some Chinese scientists have not been given recognition for their contributions," Lubroth said.

The FAO said Chinese officials agreed to meet again this month to set up a small working group to discuss the details of the intellectual property agreement. The group would also talk about the possibility of convening a regional forum to discuss scientific issues related to the epidemic.

Officials at the Ministry of Agriculture declined to answer questions by phone about the pig deaths and did not respond to questions faxed to them.

The tissue samples that China has obtained are the key to any scientific research on what's killing the pigs in China. Without them, it's impossible to verify the type of illness, much less develop a cure for it.

As with all viruses, the more the blue ear pig disease spreads, the more money there is to be made in a vaccine.

Mao Changqing, an analyst with CITIC Securities in Beijing, estimates that the blue ear vaccine market in China's domestic market alone is worth roughly $105 million this year and -- assuming the virus continues to kill -- up to $265 million next year.

It is against this backdrop that worries are mounting that what seemed to be an ordinary outbreak of swine disease here in Guangdong province on the country's southern coast -- the same place where some of the earliest cases of avian flu were reported -- is mutating and spreading.

At least 26 of China's 33 provinces and regions have announced they found diseased pigs within their borders. The FAO said in interviews last week that it has confirmed that the disease is moving to the west, where some breeders from the southern areas had taken their pigs to keep them safe in the early months of the disease. The FAO said one of the latest outbreaks occurred in July near Chongqing, an industrial city in southwestern China where many U.S. companies operate.

Chinese officials have been tracking a mysterious illness in pigs since summer 2006, when more than 2 million pigs fell ill and 400,000 of them died. But it wasn't until this year that China was able to confirm that blue ear pig disease was the cause. Chinese officials said that they informed the public as soon as they knew.

Since then, the government has made regular public announcements detailing the number of ill pigs and the progress of the disease through the country. This stands in sharp contrast to how China dealt with SARS, which originated in animals but jumped to humans and spread rapidly around the world before China admitted that the virus may have originated within its borders.

The most detailed information about the disease appeared in a paper published in a new online scientific journal called PLoS ONE, run by the nonprofit Public Library of Science in San Francisco. Written by a team of animal researchers from China's top academies, the paper traces the epidemiological origin of the virus, provides pictures of the pathogen under an electron microscope and offers its genetic sequence.

But the public paper released by the Chinese scientists has had only a cursory peer review -- by editors of the paper, whose goal is to get information up faster and leave it online for public peer review -- and leaves many questions unanswered.