This little piggy went to market - update

THE number of dead pigs pulled from the Huangpu River in Shanghai has now reached over 10,000 since the city government started finding the pigs about two weeks ago. According to The Shanghai Daily, as of 3 pm yesterday, the number of dead pigs hauled from the waters was 10,164 after another 369 carcasses were plucked from the river.

What me all our friends are asking is how do you even start to transport that many dead pigs to one place without anyone taking notice - bizzare is about all you can say. Everything is super-sized in China - the cities, the conspicuous wealth, the poverty and the buildings but 10,000 dead pigs and no one is saying anything about where they came from, how they got dumped in the river and more important why they were killed.

The government continues to tell residents not to panic, saying that all the tests show the tap water from the nine water plants near the city meet the national standards.

Though the city government has been updating the situation regularly on its official microblog since March 11 three days after someone posted pictures of the dead pigs there are still no answers about where the pigs came from other than some ear tags showed the dead pigs were raised in Zhejiang Province's Jiaxing City, located upstream from Shanghai.

With the PM2.5 pollutant count in Shanghai this morning at 153 (Toronto is 19) and the thought of a random pig floating past our balcony, I'm glad were heading back to Toronto today for two weeks - need a break from this occasional craziness.

Not for the faint of heart

Well just in case you missed this whopper of a story  the Shanghai Daily along with papers like the Wall Street Journal etc reported 3,300 dead pigs were found floating or washed up on the banks of the Huangpu River just a mile or so upstream from Shanghai.

Shanghai officials said "they had found no health threat to the city's water supply after the 3,300 pig carcasses were found in the river". A spokeswoman did admit one city waterworks plant was taking extra precautions in its treatment of water for tap usage. Authorities said one test they conducted on the water found a pig-borne disease called porcine circovirus, which doesn't normally affect humans. I guess "normally" is the key operative word here.

According to the story in the WSJ, floating pigs aren't Shanghai's only water-pollution problem this year. Residents near where pigs were being pulled from the river went days in January without tap water when a chemical transporter leaked benzene into a Huangpu River tributary. More than 20 people were hospitalized in the incident.

Theresa and I along with every other expat in the city drinks bottled water but sometimes you look at the bottled water and say "I wonder where that comes from/". Suffice to say we are both happy and healthy and continuing to enjoy life in Asia even with a few blips like 3,300 dead pigs floating in the river just upstream from our apartment.