Australia's biggest pork producer SunPork has confirmed several of its piggeries in eastern states have been affected by Japanese encephalitis virus.
SunPork Group CEO and managing director Dr Robert van Barneveld said they had detected the virus last week.
"We've been working on this endlessly since Friday night when we first were made aware that it was an issue," Dr van Barneveld said
"One of the Goondiwindi farms has been infected ... we have an infected premises in New South Wales ... There are infected premises all down the east coast," Dr van Barneveld said.
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Dr van Barneveld said it was not a new occurrence and there was no cause for alarm.
"The piggeries are innocent bystanders. Pigs are not going to infect other pigs. It's not going to have a negative effect at an abattoir. The pork is safe to eat. It's play on," he said.
"If a mosquito bites people and if it bites horses, they're called dead end hosts, so it doesn't pass on. If it bites a pig - a pig's an amplifier - so if another mosquito bites that pig while it's viremic, which is a very short period of time, it can transmit in the mosquito population.
"That's why there are controls around the movement of pigs.
"If you're going to have an emergency animal disease, this is the one to have.
"We're not actually anticipating any significant disruption to our operations at all."
Dr van Barneveld said authorities were working well together to protect humans and animals.
"This is about protecting people and the bad guy in the process is a mosquito and the weather patterns.
"The state health departments and the state chief veterinary officers have worked extremely well together.
"They understand that eradicating it is going to be very unlikely and they're being very practical around the movement of pigs and making sure people are safe."
Dr van Barneveld said SunPork had done a lot of preparedness work around African swine fever and had good relationships with the state chief veterinary officers which puts it in a very good position to manage this.
"When you get a disease like this, there are a whole stack of legislative instruments that are pushed into place that have to be executed, and they're following those processes.
"Everyone's fairly calm about it and think we can manage through it with minimal disruption."
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