AS CHINA’S agriculture authorities scramble to contain the spread of a pig-killing virus, experts worry that it could spread elsewhere in Asia. But the consequences of the disease at home are bad enough. Pork is China’s favourite meat. Pig farming is big business. The collapse of its market would hamper economic growth. Badly handled, the outbreak could dent the government’s credibility.

The disease was first reported on August 3rd, when it was noted that 47 out of 383 pigs on a small farm in Liaoning, a province in the far north-east, had died. The virus has spread to five other provinces: Anhui, Henan, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. The authorities have stepped up inspections, shut some live markets, stopped the transport of pigs from the affected areas and culled nearly 40,000 swine. On September 5th the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) held an emergency meeting of regional animal-health experts in Bangkok. The rapid onset of the disease in China and its spread to places 1,000km apart mean it could easily jump across China’s borders, says the FAO.

A number of big rural districts with plenty of pig farms fall within the territory of Beijing, the capital. City officials say they are taking measures to screen them, check sanitation and impose quarantine. However, at several pig farms in Shunyi and Huairou districts, 60km north of Beijing’s city centre, workers said no special measures had yet been taken. One said he had never even heard of African swine fever, as the disease is known.

The virus spreads easily between pigs, killing nearly all it infects. But health experts across the world agree that it cannot spread to humans, even through eating the meat of an infected pig. The Chinese, however, tend to mistrust official pronouncements on such matters, so the website of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official organ, was widely mocked when its headline declared that everyone should be “at ease about eating pork”. Indeed, many assumed that something must be wrong with it. He Qinglian, an exiled critic of the party, said on Twitter that chefs should lay 100 tables on Tiananmen Square so that agriculture officials could publicly eat the pork of the infected pigs.

Foreign observers are likely to be just as wary. The Chinese authorities have a long history of dissembling about diseases that affect both humans and animals, including the SARS crisis of 2003 and an outbreak of another porcine infection, blue-ear pig disease, in 2007. In both cases China played down the severity of the crises and stonewalled inquiries from foreign governments and international agencies. This year American health officials have accused China of violating agreements and withholding lab samples of another deadly disease, the H7N9 flu virus, which can infect both poultry and humans.

This time the pig fever is stoking fears of inflation. The cost of pork has an inordinate effect on the consumer-price index. With a fifth of the world’s population, China consumes half its pork. The government has set up a strategic pork reserve to keep the price stable. The blue-ear pig-disease episode of 2007 provoked a rise of 87% in pork prices and one of the biggest leaps in inflation for nearly two decades.

Inflation now is at its highest rate in four months. The consumer-price index rose 1.9% in June and 2.1% in July. An editorial on September 4th in Caixin, an influential financial publication, said that Chinese history had taught “painful lessons about the dangers of inflation” and the government had “a rare time-window to prevent inflation from escalating”. The spread of African swine fever will not make it any easier to control.

The timing is particularly awkward since the outbreak coincided with the much-vaunted Forum on China-Africa Co-operation, hosted by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, on September 3rd and 4th in Beijing, to win African hearts, minds and business deals. The last thing the event’s promoters wanted to see was the word “African” attached to a story about dying pigs. An official at Beijing’s Agriculture Bureau said the topic was “too sensitive” to discuss while the forum was under way and suggested that your correspondent find something else to write about.