INFECTED: Workers from ‘The Pink Pig’ slaughterhouse in Spain have contracted rubella

A DOZEN workers at ‘The Pink Pig’ slaughterhouse in Zaragoza have contracted rubella , the highest concentration of cases in Spain since 2012.

The Aragon Government and abattoir company Grupo Jorge, said there is no ‘risk to the population due to the consumption of meat’, adding ‘the outbreak dos not have any relationship with the work activity, it has coincided here simply because it is a space of coexistence’.

In 2016, he World Health Organisaton (WHO) included Spain among those countries free of rubella, which means that the circulation of the virus in the country ‘has been interrupted’.

But imported cases, people who have become infected while abroad, and secondary cases, where the affected person transmits the disease, can still occur.

President of the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology, Jose Miguel Cisneros, said ‘the existing high vaccination coverage, above 95 per cent, confer protection that will prevent the outbreak from going further.’

Rubella is an infectious disease which is caused by a virus.

Although the affects tends to be less serious in children and adults, it can be highly dangerous for unborn babies if the pregnant mother becomes infected.