Flu infections rising among pigs in China: study

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Scientists said Wednesday that flu infections were rising among pigs raised for slaughter on farms in south and southeastern China, also plagued by bird flu.

And the risk of spillover to humans was "constant or growing", according to one of the authors of a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Pigs are an important source of new human strains of influenza A, such as the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic that emerged in Mexico and infected an estimated fifth of the world's population.

Pigs can act as a "mixing vessel" in a process known as reassortment, brewing new flu strains from swine, poultry and human viruses in areas where they live in close proximity.

Such new hybrids can be deadly -- tens of millions of people died in flu pandemics in 1918, 1957 and 1968.

An article in the science journal Nature last month highlighted that H7N9 seems to be circulating in areas of China that have large populations of pigs and humans "providing opportunities for further adaptation to mammals and for reassortment with human- or pig-adapted viruses".

China is a priority for flu surveillance given the high densities of humans, swine and fowl in the region, the team wrote.

"Currently, China produces and consumes almost 50 percent of the world's pork, requiring an enormous swine population."

The authors stressed their findings did not mean that flu was more prevalent in pigs in China than in other countries for which data mostly did not exist.

The Chinese data was a rare example of long-term, systematic surveillance of influenza in swine, and should be commended, they said.