South Africa's elite Scorpions crime-fighters have joined the hunt for a ship that may have brought a potentially disastrous livestock disease into the country, a government official said Sunday.
A food supplier who sold the contaminated swill to an animal breeder in Camperdown Kwazulu Natal Province, in the east of South Africa, was helping officials track down the boat that supplied him, said agriculture ministry spokesman Bongiwe Njobe.
Elite police units and customs officials joined forces to trace the ship after the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease at the Camperdown pig farm.
Government agencies were worried the disease could cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export revenue.
Health officials think the animals were infected by swill brought in by the vessel, which was moored in the southeast port of Durban.
"We have never had this virus here before and we have sent samples to the United Kingdom to get more data to help us contain it," said Njobe.
Farmers have already had to slaughter hundreds of pigs and cows on three farms in the Camperdown and Pietermaritzburg areas of the province, said KwaZulu-Natal Province agriculture officials.
The area, where stockbreeding is the main agricultural activity, has now been designated a quarantine zone.
Army and police reinforcements were on Saturday already patrolling the quarantine perimeter set up 10 kilometers (six miles) around affected farms in Kwazulu-Natal, in the east of South Africa.
Soldiers erected barriers against errant animals and police were spraying cars and farm vehicles emerging from the zone with disinfectants -- JOHANNESBURG(AFP)
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