Outside Björshult’s waste facility in Nyköping municipality you can see the tracks of the wild boar; excavated soil, footprints, and entire paths that reveal how they entered the facility.
David Lundevall, who works at the technical division in Nyköping municipality, shows how the pig uses a hole in the fence.
– Wild boars are good at getting through what is needed to get where they want. If they smell food in here, they can lift this fence, which is not designed for wild boar, he says.
At Björshult waste plant, they think this is very serious.
– If it is found that the infection comes from waste facilities, we must do our utmost to prevent it, says Mikael Mellberg, who is the operations manager at the facility.
– The infection could get to domestic pig stock and that would be very serious.
41 wild boar found to be infected
There are currently 41 confirmed infected wild boars in the Fagerstat district. One hypothesis is that, for example, ham was made abroad on infected pigs, and that such leftover food ended up at the Fagersta waste station, where it is known that the wild boar fared.
And this could, in theory, happen in more places.
TV4 Nyheterna has sent out a survey to which 166 municipalities responded. 31 of the municipalities have at some point encountered wild boar at their waste facilities. In 20 of the municipalities, they have had it in the past year.
– I think it is both remarkable and to me surprising that so many municipalities have wild boars at their waste disposal sites, says state epizootologist Karl Ståhl at the Swedish Veterinary Institute, SVA.
– We do not know in and of itself whether the garbage dump is the origin of the infection in Fagersta, we will probably never know, but it is a risk factor that wild boars get access to garbage where there may be meat or meat remains, he continues.
At Björshults, an electric fence has been set up to do something about the situation.
– We hope that we can exclude the wild boar from here, so that at least this danger can be eliminated at the waste facility. It is our duty to do everything in our power to prevent that, says Mikael Mellberg.