2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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of helping financially to manage pigs until a golf course in the capitol got rooted up during the legislative session and then they were all very unhappy when they couldn’t go and play golf and so, they all wanted to say, OK, well what are you doing about this, well, some money would be nice, but, yeah, and so the, the impacts to properties are very real, but the thing I really think about more these days and I want to harp on this as the growing for us is human health and safety issues – so, for us, we’ve got – with pigs it’s a little over 20 diseases that they carry that we, we know of actively and about a dozen of them are zoonotic so you and I can catch them – and these diseases include swine brucellosis, tuberculosis, anthrax, foot and mouth disease, salmonella, there is a swine variant of hepatitis and, and here’s the one thing I don’t know and I need to check is how many of these diseases actually exist in Hawaii and which diseases you don’t have because you’ve been able to stay isolated on the Island, which could be a saving grace, but many of these are, are quite damaging especially to older people and some of them are lethal if not treated like the swine variant of hepatitis will cause liver and kidney failure within ten days or two weeks, if not treated, and we have a few people every year that die from them just from exposure but increasingly the thing I really worry about is kids – so I have to have my photo of the kid here looking at the pig through the fence. The thing I worry about is not direct exposure like this kid – but we have a lot of areas where we have sports fields, community gardens – things like that where pigs are coming in and they’re present and then they’re defecating on the landscape and we’ve got little ones that are out there playing. We had a public health issue several years ago now where there is a community soccer field, you know, little kids soccer they’re teaching and there’s a little boy over there that was eating something and the coach had to go see what it was and he was just filling his mouth pig poop. I don’t understand, I still don’t understand but it happened and so the parents concern what could he have been exposed to, right? The doctors are calling the health department saying what might he have been exposed to – what do we need to do to treat him – and the solution is simply if the pigs weren’t there this wouldn’t be a problem. So, I want to point out some of the emerging wild pig issues that we’re dealing with and some of these are global issues – you get a lot of insulation being where you are, and, in this way when we deal with things from the old world even, north and south America get insulation just being not physically connected to Europe and Asia, but one of the things that we’re facing that’s coming in the future is African swine fever and this is an old slide here from the last twenty-teens – Europe was facing this in 2016 – 2017 where for commercial pig operations they were killing hundreds of thousands of pigs that got this disease – so what it is, it’s a hemorrhagic disease so it’s similar to Ebola, it’s similar to Anthrax and that these animals bleed to death and it’s, it’s not pleasant and it’s graphic, ah, it’s really quite a shame. It comes out of Africa originally like the name suggests and it evolved there with African wart hogs – they don’t succumb to the disease – they can tolerate it and it’s carried by ticks and a few other bugs – but now you have pig to pig contact and this stuff, as far as we know is 100% lethal to the kind of swine that we deal with that are all descended from wild boars. The problem is how it moves around – so as you might imagine – you can get it from infected domestic or wild pigs but the bigger thing we’ve seen in terms of moving it is people moving it on 12