Systematic Veterinary Virology

INTRODUCTION

• African swine fever (ASF) is a tickborne and contagious, febrile, systemic viral disease of swine. ASF can cause mortality up to 100% of pigs. ASF can only be distinguished from the similar disease classical swine fever (hog cholera) by laboratory tests. The ASF virus was formerly classified in the family Iridoviridae, later as an unclassified virus and now under a new family Asfaviridae. It was first described in Kenya, East Africa, in 1921, and soon afterwards in South Africa and Angola, as a disease that killed settlers' pigs