Introduction
As African swine fever virus (ASFV) continues to spread across Europe
and Asia (Dixon, Sun & Roberts, 2019), the United States Department of
Agriculture has worked hard to identify potential risks for viral entry
to the country and develop national response plans (USDA, 2020). While
the primary focus has been on the risk of illegal entry of pork
products, along with travelers from ASFV-positive countries (Taylor et
al. 2019, Ito S, Jurado C, Sanchez-Vizcaino JM, & Isoda N, 2020), the
possibility of ASFV entry via the importation of contaminated feed
ingredients continues to gain recognition, based on a growing body of
scientific evidence (Dee et al. 2018, Niederwerder et al. 2019, Stoian A
et al. 2019, Dee et al. 2020). Recent publications have described the
transmission of ASFV to naïve pigs following consumption of contaminated
feed, along with the calculation of the minimum infectious oral dose in
feed (Niederwerder et al. 2019). Survival of ASFV in several feed
ingredients has been documented out to at least 30 days post-inoculation
using shipping models simulating movement of feed ingredients from
Eastern Europe to the US (Dee et al. 2018, Stoian et al. 2019). A
consistent observation across all these studies was the ability of ASFV
to survive in soy-based products, i.e., conventional (high protein/low
fat) soybean meal, organic (low protein/high fat), soybean meal and soy
oil cake, with reported half-lives of 9.6, 12.9, and 12.4 days,
respectively (Dee et al. 2018, Stoian et al. 2019). This information
justifies the need to understand the countries of origin of these
specific ingredients, the respective volumes imported, and US ports of
entry (POE) utilized. Access to these data would allow regulatory
agencies to focus efforts and dedicate resources to a subset of critical
ports, rather than the 329 US ports of entry (seaports, border
crossings, and airports) currently overseen by Customs and Border
Protection (United States Customs and Border Protection, 2020).
Therefore, the purpose of this short communication was to conduct an
analytical exercise to generate this information.