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A dead pig is seen in a dirty tributary of the Yangtze River, in central China's Hebei province, some 750 miles from the city of Shanghai, in a photo taken on March 12, 2013. The number of dead pigs found in the Huangpu River, which runs through China's commercial hub Shanghai, has reached more than 13,000, state media reported on March 18.

BEIJING – To the chagrin of Shanghai city residents, there’s more “pork chop soup” on the menu for the foreseeable future. 

More than a week since authorities in Shanghai started pulling thousands of dead pigs from one of the city’s major waterways, the Huangpu River, municipal authorities in that city of 23 million are continuing to pull hundreds of carcasses from its waterways each day, bringing the total since last week to over 13,000. 

Workers on Sunday pulled nearly 500 pigs from the Huangpu, bringing the total found from that river alone to over 9,500. The Huangpu River supplies over a fifth of Shanghai’s drinking water.

As the pig tally creeps up, Shanghai government officials have been struggling to put a positive spin on the ghoulish images popping up each day from the city’s waterways. 

A report Monday in People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, focused on the stepped up food and water quality tests across the city. It also earnestly noted that not only have the numbers of pigs being pulled from the rivers dropped, but the size of them too.

Citing a report from Shanghai’s city government, the paper stated that two thirds of the most recent carcasses found were piglets, suggesting that the worse may have passed.

Social media outrage
Still, the daily sight of carcasses being pulled from the city’s waterways for disposal has angered the public and sparked a spirited discussion on China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo. 

Reports that many of the pigs found have tested positive for porcine circovirus, a virus that has killed large numbers of pigs in the region in recent months, has also raised suspicions about the safety of Shanghai’s water supply.

“The water must have been polluted [by these dead pigs],” wrote one user named Lujun, “Authorities are being dishonest and trying to hide something.”

“The government is as corrupt as these dead pigs,” another user using the name Ziyoudeweini wrote disgustedly. “I feel so cold. Who can we count on?” 

“Water quality in the Huangpu River has been normal up to now,” one official at the Shanghai Information Office assured NBC News Monday. He also stressed that porcine circovirus cannot be contracted by humans. 

Where are they coming from?
Shanghai officials have stepped up surveillance for dead pigs around the Huangpu River and have called upon local government in the nearby city of Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province to step up their own searches. 

Just northeast of Shanghai, Jiaxing is believed to be the source of many of the dead pigs floating down into Shanghai. Shanghai’s Information Office officials declined to speculate on whether Jiaxing was the sole source of all the pigs, but told NBC News that the prefecture was the focus of a joint Shanghai-Jiaxing investigation.

An official at the Jiaxing Environmental Protection Agency declined to comment on the progress of the investigation late Monday.

But steps were being taken in Jiaxing to curb the continued dumping of pigs into the region’s waterways. The city’s local newspaper, Jiaxing Daily, reported that leaflets had been passed out to farmers in the region, urging them to properly dispose of dead pigs with local authorities rather than quietly dumping them into the river.

Jiaxing is likely not the only community to be dumping dead pigs into its waterways, as reports indicate that porcine circovirus has spiked across farming communities this winter, killing more pigs than usual. Many have speculated that farmers have been attempting to discretely dispose of the sick pigs rather than reporting them to authorities and risk investigation.

NBC News’ Danny Zhang contributed to this report.

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More than 2,800 dead pigs found in Chinese river

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Nick Perry / AP

John Rose stands in a field on his dairy farm in New Zealand on Thursday. A drought on the country's North Island is costing farmers millions of dollars each day and is beginning to take a toll on the country's economy.

Authorities in Wellington, New Zealand, have issued an outright ban on outdoor water use as a worsening drought has siphoned the available supply to less than half of normal level and prompted the government to declare the worst water shortage in 30 years.

New Zealand's capital, home to more than 200,000 people, has just 19 days' supply of water left in its reservoirs, the APNZ news service reported.

"The water supply situation is now approaching extreme," the Greater Wellington Regional Council said in a statement on its website, adding that it is also asking residents to cut indoor water use "to help us avoid a crisis."

Wellington hasn't seen a significant rain since Feb. 4, and while a storm is forecast for this weekend, it will have no real impact on the water supply, authorities said. All of the North Island, which holds most of the country's population, has been declared a drought zone. Auckland on Thursday issued an outdoor fire ban.

The Wellington City Council said urgent action had to be taken to ensure that homes and businesses had sufficient water.

"Water levels in our local rivers -- the source of our water supply -- are extremely low and dropping," the council said in a statement. "A significant reduction in demand for water will extend the number of days that back-up storage will last, so it’s important to save water now."

The drought has had a major impact on farmers, who estimate that it has so far cost them $820 million in lost export earnings, The Associated Press reported, adding that the damage is rising daily as they reduce their herds, which in turn reduces milk production.

"We are beginning to see a decline in milk production -- in fact, a sharp decline in some areas -- and farmers are considering slaughtering capital stock, which will result in lower future production and reduced revenue," New Zealand Finance Minister Bill English said Tuesday during a Parliament meeting.

Brett Phibbs / AP

Fields are turning from their normal green to a dry and crunchy brown as the drought worsens.

"It's very hard to remember when the last rainfall was," dairy farmer John Rose told the AP, adding that he had sent more than 100 of his cows to slaughter in recent weeks as the drought turned pastures brown and dry. He said the move was necessary to make sure his remaining 550 cows had enough to eat -- a challenge even as he mixes in palm kernels with their feed to try to stretch it.

Like most farmers, he's concerned about the future, as are some government officials.

"We know the drought will peg back growth in the economy, but it is not yet clear by how much," English told Parliament.

Even if the current drought eases soon, the long-term picture isn't rosy, according to climate scientists.

The government's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research predicts that farmers in the southern part of the North Island, the area around Wellington, will spend up to 10 percent more time per year in drought by the middle of the century.

More NBC News coverage of New Zealand

BEIJING — Thousands of dead pigs, a number of them diseased, were found in Shanghai's major drinking water supply in the last two days, officials said.

According to Xinmin newspaper, 2,813 pigs were fished out of the Huangpu River, which provides drinking water for Shanghai's 23 million people. When contacted for up-to-date information on the number of pigs retrieved from the river, officials referred NBC News to the local news report.

Some of the pigs were infected with porcine circovirus (PCV) virus, according to an official statement by the Shanghai Agriculture Committee. The statement posted on China's Twitter-like social media service Weibo said that the disease would not infect humans. 

A water management officer said by telephone that results of hourly water tests were normal.  

"We are adding more chlorine as an action to protect water safety," said the official who would only identified herself as Zhu.

Water pollution, usually created by fertilizer run-off, chemical spills and untreated sewage, is a big problem in China. According to Reuters, the government will invest $850 billion over the next decade to improve the water supply system.

People from the Songjiang area of Shanghai, where many of the pigs were found, said this was not the first time they had seen the carcasses floating in the river.

Eugene Hoshiko / AP

A dead pig floats in a river on the outskirts of Shanghai on Monday.

"Am I scared? I have been hearing this kind of news all the time, so I am immune," said Songjiang resident Ma Leiying, 42, who works as a clerk at a state-owned company. "I’m sure other cities have the same problems, but the difference is the incidents have not been reported yet."

Some expressed outrage via Weibo.

"Have we been drinking dead-pig-polluted water? We are already panicked by the polluted air now we have to worry about poisoned water too," one user wrote.

Xinmin News, Shanghai’s most popular newspaper paper, reported that labels on some of the carcasses indicated that the animals had come from Zhejiang and Jiangshu provinces.   

According to Jiaxing Daily, many pigs have died in the area in recent months. In Zhulin village alone, there were 10,078 dead pigs in January, 8,325 in February, it reported.  The newspaper added that the cause of death was down to the cramped conditions the animals were kept in.

The Associated Press reported that the surge in the dumping of dead pigs came after a police campaign to curb the illegal trade in sick pig parts.

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This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 6:14 AM EDT

Egypt's health minister and a regional governor were locked inside a hospital room by villagers on Tuesday as they visited the area in response to reports of sickness caused by the drinking water, the BBC reported.

Mohammed Mustafa and Minufiya Gov. Ashraf Hilal were visiting sick villagers in Sunsaft when local people confronted them about the contaminated water. According to the BBC, villagers locked the hospital room door, showed them bottles of tap water and told them to "drink it."

About an hour later, police intervened and freed the two officials from the hospital.

Mustafa ordered the closure of unlicensed water sources in Sunsaft, the BBC reported, while Hilal suspended government employees in charge of the village's main water supply. The Daily News Egypt said the Ministry of Health has reported 56 severe cases, but the state-run news agency, Mena, estimated the number of those affected was more than 400, according to the BBC.

Symptoms included high fever, sever diarrhea and vomiting.

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By Duncan Golestani
NBC News

JORDAN VALLEY -- Faisel Njoom undoubtedly has the best house in Auja. Drinking iced tea in the shade of his garden he talks with pride at being the biggest land owner in the village and the oranges and bananas that he once grew on his farm. Only later, standing in one of his dry and dusty fields in the Jordan Valley, does he become angry.

“Life without water is not a life,” he said as the sun began to set. “This land without water is like all the other deserts. We were born working this land.”

He says he couldn’t keep farming because the irrigation channels to his land began drying up in 2000. He, and many charities, blame the digging of a new well near the Auja Spring, designed to serve a nearby Israeli settlement.

For first time in many years there is water flowing in the spring long after winter has finished because rainfall has increased by a fifth over the last year. Otherwise, the spring would now be dry. Almotaz Abadi, a consultant to the Palestinian Water Authority, explained that, rainfall is the biggest factor contributing to water availability, but the Auja Spring has been adversely affected by other factors, principally the new well.

The reminder of how plentiful water used to be in Auja has reignited resentment -- a feeling shared widely among Palestinians in the occupied territories. The World Bank and international charities accuse Israel of denying enough water to the Palestinians. Ironically, it’s a situation made worse by the Oslo Peace Accords.

The Oslo II agreement in 1995 set up a joint water committee to oversee management of the aquifers in the West Bank. It was supposed to encourage consensus, but a World Bank report in 2009 concluded Israel dominated the process, taking 80 percent of the water resources.  (In recognizing that the Palestinian Water Authority’s powers were severely limited, the report also criticized its management abilities).

Agriculture is key to the Palestinian economy and its third largest employer. But it could be much bigger. The World Bank found that problems with irrigation are holding the sector back, especially when combined with the Separation Barrier cutting off land and access to wells.

Many Palestinians see this water divide as a way of increasing their dependency on Israel. Amnesty International estimates some 180,000 to 200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water. It means many have to buy water from Israeli tankers at high prices.

Israelis complain of water scarcity too. After much persuasion with an armed guard, NBC News was allowed to film inside Yitav, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. It is indeed a green outpost in the desert, but the settlers say it comes at a high price – which they pay with their utility bills.

Israel’s Water Authority disputes the claims made by the World Bank and other charities. At their offices in Tel Aviv we were shown a map of locations where licenses have been granted for Palestinian wells, but never pumped. “You have to know most of the Palestinian cities in the West Bank have better access to water than residents in Amman, the capital of Jordan,” said Baruch Nager, Head of Water Administration for the West Bank.

Both sides have hydrological data to support their side of the argument, which makes it particularly hard to resolve.

Water is a ‘final status issue’ in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. No decisions will be taken on how control of the water is divided until there is a peace agreement. That, of course, has never looked further away.