are heading for the first annual decline since 1990. Tyson Foods Inc. idled slaughterhouses, and U.S. hog farmers haven't been profitable in a year. Imports from the U.S. fell 38 percent in Russia this year and 73 percent in China, including Hong Kong, USDA data show. Surveillance of pig populations At the beginning of June 2009, the U.S. Agriculture Department said it would launch a pilot surveillance project to look for new strains of flu virus in pigs. Some experts claim that global health officials have underestimated the risk that pig herds might be a source of new influenza strains, choosing instead to focus on the threat of bird flu. Until recently, health experts have done very little surveillance of influenza among pigs—even though the virus is very common in the animals and just as transmissible as it is among people. Flu viruses have also been shown to pass from pigs to people and from people to pigs. Responses by country Afghanistan As reported by The Daily Telegraph, Afghanistan's only pig has been taken off display in the Kabul Zoo and "quarantined" as a response to visitor's fears about contracting swine flu. Argentina A case of human-to-swine transmission was discovered in Buenos Aires province, on June 25. The hog farm where it occurred has been interdicted. Canada On May 2, Canadian Food Inspection Agency executive vice-president Brian Evans announced that an infected Alberta farm worker recently returned from Mexico had apparently passed the virus to a swine herd in his care. Although the herd had been quarantined, Evans stressed that the infection represented no threat to food safety and judged the possibility of infected pigs passing the virus back to humans "remote". Evans said the infection of the herd was the first known case of the H1N1 virus being transmitted from humans to pigs. In Canada in early June, an Alberta pig farmer whose herd was infected with the new swine flu virus culled his entire herd. In May he had already culled 500 animals from his herd. The farm owner said the animals cannot be marketed because they are under quarantine and he is facing a problem with overcrowding. Transmission from the same herd of pigs back to humans was revealed on 20 July, though it occurred on 7 May when the humans, animal health inspectors, were taking samples from the infected herd with improper self-protective measures. China The