As early as August 25, the State Veterinary Institute, SVA, received information about dead wild boars found by hunters. But it took almost two weeks before the authority announced that swine fever had been discovered.
The fact that it took until September 6 before SVA reported that the infection was present in Sweden is due to the authority classifying the first alarms according to a slower routine, reports Dagens Nyheter.
The hunter who found the first dead boar received a test kit in the mail. It was then sent back in the mail with sample material in it, which takes time.
– If it had involved three or more animals, we would have classified it as a “suspicious case”. Now we classified it as an “observation”. A suspicious case would have meant that we took a faster measure and sent a veterinarian to take samples, says Erika Chenais, state veterinarian at SVA.
According to Erika Chenais, today it does not matter how the first treatment was done because it is a slowly spreading disease.