Officials have told residents their drinking water is safe, while authorities have censored microblog posts suggesting that the public organize peaceful protests

BeijingThe pig carcasses – about 14,000 of them – have been floating down rivers that feed into Shanghai for nearly two weeks. The city’s residents have been told not to worry, and not much else.

Where the pigs came from, how they died and why they suddenly showed up in the river system that supplies drinking water to a city of 23 million has not been explained. Officials have told residents their drinking water is safe, while authorities have censored microblog posts suggesting that the public organize peaceful protests.

The official response reminds many of the government silence that surrounded previous health concerns, from the SARS epidemic to bird flu to contaminated milk.

“They are only giving the runaround,” said Huang Beibei, a Shanghai microblogger whose revolting photographs of the pigs first prompted local media coverage and government attention. “‘Who believes what they are saying?”

“Those pigs must have come from somewhere,” author Li Mingsheng said. “That’s a basic question, but the government still has not told us that.”

Authorities have retrieved at least 13,996 dead pigs as of Wednesday, and have released daily bulletins saying drinking water in Shanghai remains within national standards.

Except for pig tallies by Shanghai authorities and one late-night news conference by a local official in nearby Zhejiang province, where the pigs are suspected to originate, no top official and no head of any government agency dealing with the environment, health or agriculture has made any public comment.

Officials so far have punished only the eight small-time hog farmers whose pigs could be traced through ear marks. The farmers in the Zhejiang town of Jiaxing, where hog farming is a major industry, were each slapped with a fine under 3,000 yuan ($480).

The central government in Beijing, 삼척출장샵 which has been enmeshed in a leadership transition, dispatched a chief Agriculture Ministry veterinarian, but Yu Kangzhen’s conclusion was merely that there had been no major outbreak of swine disease to blame for the dumping.

Villagers have told local media that pig dumping spiked in the wake of a police crackdown on the illicit trade in pork products harvested from dead, diseased pigs. With no black-market traders to collect their dead pigs, farmers are simply dumping them in rivers, they say. Other observers have suggested that farmers are feeding pigs small amounts of arsenic to make their skins look shinier, thus increasing their mortality rate. Government officials have not addressed either theory.

Jiaxing’s vice mayor, Zhao Shumei, told reporters Friday that pigs were succumbing to cold weather, and suggested it was largely baby pigs that were dying. Critics of that explanation swiftly noted that most of the carcasses downstream have been of adult hogs and that this winter has not been harsh.

The Associated Press sought comment from the governments of Shanghai, Jiaxing and Zhejiang and from the Agriculture Ministry, but the calls were either referred to another agency or not answered.

Authorities have not censored popular jokes spreading online in China. In one joke, a resident of smoggy Beijing boasts he doesn’t need cigarettes because he can simply open his window, and a Shanghai resident responds that he gets pork soup from his faucet.