Swine fever has made its way into China, home to half the world’s pigs.

This is not the first time Europe has been struck by ASF. In 1957, it was introduced into Portugal, reportedly after infected airline food was fed as swill to pigs near Lisbon airport. The disease spread to Spain and France and took until the 1990s to eradicate through concerted surveillance and culling. In southern Spain, where ticks acted as an additional reservoir, old-fashioned farm buildings were destroyed and replaced with modern facilities to keep ticks out. “There was a major effort to eradicate it,” says Linda Dixon, a cell biologist who works on ASF at the UK’s Pirbright Institute.This time the spread has been far more rapid despite considerable biosecurity efforts. The current outbreak in central and eastern Europe began in January 2014, when cases were first reported in Lithuania, swiftly followed by outbreaks in Poland in February, and in Latvia and Estonia in June and September that year.