However, there are no reports of any fatality among the pigs till now. The director of animal husbandry and veterinary department, Lalbiakmawia, today told this correspondent over phone that the virus has reached Mizoram from neighbouring Myanmar, where people like their counterparts in Mizoram, are pork-eaters.
As a result, the import of pigs from Myanmar has been put on hold and Lalbiakmawia made it clear there would not be any relaxation on the import ban imposed in April this year.
The director said the disease was detected in a few pigs which were suffering from fever after detailed tests conducted on them in two institutes — a research complex of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) at Barapani near Shillong in Meghalaya and College of Veterinary Sciences in Selesih near here.
He said the symptoms of the disease are generally triggered by an antigen named as arterivirus, which is generally propagated through respiration and through the seminal fluid in pigs.
Tracing the history of the disease, Lalbiakmawia, who is a veterinary doctor, said the virus was first detected in the US in 1987 and since then it has been periodically surfacing in some South Asian countries, including Myanmar. Lalbiakmawia said efforts are now on India and some other Southeast Asian countries to isolate and treat the virus in a bid to discover the particular antigen for tackling the disease.