African swine fever (ASF) cases have been reported from two farms in the southern Indian state of Kerala, officials said Friday. The cases were detected at Mananthavady in Wayanad district, about 468 km north of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala. "The disease was detected among pigs of two farms in the district and later confirmed after the samples were tested at the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases in Bhopal," an official at the district magistrate office in Wayanad said. "The samples were collected after pigs died last week." Read: UN: China's African swine fever outbreak could cross borders According to officials, measures have been taken to prevent the spread of the disease, and an order to cull pigs has been issued. "After confirming the infection orders have been issued to cull 300 pigs from all the nearby farms to contain the infection. As per the guidelines, all pigs within a one-kilometer radius of the epicenter of the disease are to be culled if there are reports of ASF," a local media report said. ASF cases have been reported from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam last week. Experts say ASF does not affect humans. However, they could be the carriers of the virus. ■

"The exploitation of Black women continues," according to an article recently published on the website of the U.S. newspaper The Washington Post. The writer, Eddie Neal, noted in a letter to the newspaper's editors that "the spectrum of African American skin color results from the rape of Black women during and following the slave era." "As an amateur genealogist tracking my Black ancestors in North Carolina, I find instances in which females were selectively groomed by enslavers as children and then gave birth to multiple offspring by these men before they reached adulthood," Neal wrote, adding that "enslavers often fathered children when they were fathering children in their marriages." READ: Exploitation of desperate workers should never be ‘new normal’: UN expert "My research shows that the practice of rape of Black women by White men who wielded legal and economic control of their lives continued into the mid-20th century" and "mothers of mixed-race children played a pivotal and heroic role in documenting fatherhood by informing their children who their fathers were and entering the names of biological fathers on official documents, especially birth, marriage and death certificates," the writer pointed out. "Genetic analysis using DNA samples provides a quantitative method of tracking fatherhood to the actual father or close relatives," wrote the writer, adding that "data sharing between Black and White descendants of enslavers and their researchers can facilitate the process.