{"id":26678,"date":"2022-10-21T05:44:13","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T05:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=26678"},"modified":"2022-10-21T05:44:16","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T05:44:16","slug":"scientists-rush-to-create-vaccine-for-worlds-biggest-animal-disease-outbreak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2022\/10\/21\/scientists-rush-to-create-vaccine-for-worlds-biggest-animal-disease-outbreak\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists rush to create vaccine for world\u2019s biggest animal disease outbreak\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tucked between motorways in the west of the city, the drab brick building belonging to Madrid\u2019s Complutense University stretches the length of a football pitch. Inside, a series of sterile laboratories \u2013 capable of handling the world\u2019s most dangerous pathogens \u2013 can be found along a brightly lit hallway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the frontline of the EU\u2019s battle against another, albeit lesser-known, global pandemic: the highly infectious African swine fever (ASF), which has\u00a0swept through dozens of countries, forcing farms to cull millions of animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Long endemic to Africa, ASF is harmless to humans but often fatal to pigs. The current outbreak, believed to threaten around\u00a0three-quarters\u00a0of the world\u2019s herds, can be traced to the 2007 appearance of the virus in Georgia. Aided by the ability to\u00a0survive up to 1,000 days\u00a0in frozen meat and persist for long periods on clothing and vehicles, it soon began to spread beyond the Caucasus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2018, ASF turned up in China, home to around half of the world\u2019s pigs. By 2019, there were concerns that\u00a0as many as 100 million pigs\u00a0had been lost. Two years later the virus was\u00a0confirmed to be in Germany, home to one of the EU\u2019s largest swine herds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Pigs
Pigs wait to be buried alive in a pit next to workers in protective suits and excavators following an African swine fever outbreak in the area, in Beihai, China.Photograph: Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Papua New Guinea to the Dominican Republic, reports of the virus rolled in from\u00a045 countries\u00a0across five continents, forcing the protective culling of pigs, leaving family farms devastated and markets reeling from export bans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is the biggest animal disease outbreak we\u2019ve ever had on the planet,\u201d says Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at City University of Hong Kong. The only tool currently available to battle the virus, he adds, \u201cis to emphasise to farmers the importance of enhanced biosecurity\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against this background, pressure has grown to create an ASF vaccine. \u201cWhile it is possible to eradicate ASF without vaccination, it takes a long time to do it,\u201d says Jos\u00e9 Manuel S\u00e1nchez-Vizca\u00edno, a professor of animal health at Complutense University in Madrid. \u201cYou have to know the virus really well and understand where it hides and its tricks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Iberian peninsula stands out as a\u00a0singular example; after a strain of ASF was discovered in Portugal in 1957 \u2013 and again in 1960 \u2013 the Spanish and Portuguese governments waged a decades-long battle, using preventive culling and protecting domestic pigs from vectors such as soft ticks and wild boars, before declaring the virus eradicated in 1995.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experience \u2013 along with the\u00a0meteoric rise\u00a0in Europe\u2019s wild boar population \u2013 has cemented S\u00e1nchez-Vizca\u00edno\u2019s view that a vaccine is the best hope for halting ASF. The scientist is coordinating an\u00a0EU-funded global consortium\u00a0that, since its launch in 2019, has homed in on three vaccine candidates with the potential for use on domestic pigs and wild boars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The focus is now on carrying out large-scale tests to see how the candidates interact with other illnesses or pregnant sows. Broad questions continue to hover over the investigation, such as whether the vaccine developed in Spain would be equally effective in other regions and how often it would need to be administered. The aim is to have the vaccine ready to roll out by late 2024, according to S\u00e1nchez-Vizca\u00edno.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A sausage processing factory in Spain, one of the world\u2019s biggest pigmeat producers. Photograph: Denis Doyle\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Similar efforts are playing out around the world. Researchers at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in China say they have\u00a0made advances\u00a0on a live attenuated vaccine, while the Catalan research institute CReSA-IRTA has found\u00a0multiple potential vaccine candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People are quite nervous because with a live attenuated vaccine you\u2019re basically releasing a live virus into the field<\/p>Linda Dixon, Pirbright Institute<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At the Pirbright Institute in the UK, a team focused on ASF has been refining its own potential vaccine candidate for the past two years. \u201cPeople often ask why it is taking so long,\u201d says Linda Dixon, a virologist who leads ASF research at the institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople are quite nervous about it because the thing with a live attenuated vaccine \u2013 which all of these are \u2013 is basically you\u2019re releasing a live virus into the field. And there\u2019s not enough of a history to know exactly what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With several promising vaccines now identified and rigorously tested for safety, the focus has shifted to large-scale trials. \u201cWhenever you start to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of pigs, you might find out some things that weren\u2019t apparent from the smaller scale,\u201d Dixon says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A staff member stands behind vials of African swine fever vaccine for pigs during a presentation of the vaccine in Vietnam in June 2022. Photograph: Nhac Nguyen\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The risks were laid bare this year after Vietnam\u00a0announced\u00a0in June it would become the first country in the world to administer an ASF vaccine. After an outbreak of the virus in 2019 led to the culling of\u00a0more than 2 million pigs, the Vietnamese government planned to administer the vaccine to 600,000 animals in 20 provinces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, less than three months later,\u00a0state <\/a>media <\/a>reported\u00a0that vaccinations had been temporarily suspended following the deaths of around 750 inoculated pigs. According to\u00a0VietNamNet, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information and Communications, 23,344 doses of the vaccine were supplied from July to August this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not known how many of the deaths were caused by the vaccine, which had been produced in Vietnam after being developed at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and licensed to companies around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An investigation is currently under way to assess what exactly happened. A report released by the company that produced the vaccine suggested that some of the farms in three provinces had failed to heed instructions that it must be used only on healthy pigs between eight and 10 weeks old, according to Douglas Gladue, a senior scientist at the USDA\u2019s Plum Island Animal Disease Center.The US has a silent pig pandemic on its doorstep once againRead more<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe vaccine was used off-label and on farms where the pigs were not healthy,\u201d Gladue says. \u201cThe other 17 provinces that are giving the vaccine under supervision don\u2019t have any problems. Vaccination is continuing in those provinces.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

News of the Vietnam trials rippled across the global community of scientists tackling ASF, reinforcing the immensity of the challenge that lay ahead. \u201cIt was a cold shower,\u201d says S\u00e1nchez-Vizca\u00edno in Madrid. \u201cNobody was expecting that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers have received a sharp reminder of the potent virus they are facing off against in this pandemic: more resilient, more complex and less understood than the coronavirus, he adds. \u201cCovid is a really simple virus. Not like ASF.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tucked between motorways in the west of the city, the drab brick building belonging to Madrid\u2019s Complutense University stretches the length of a football pitch. Inside, a series of sterile laboratories \u2013 capable of handling the world\u2019s most dangerous pathogens \u2013 can be found along a brightly lit hallway.  This is the frontline of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":26681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1648,4899,147,8299,7024,10850,9331,7711,5313,5222,11403,7285,12297,159,6621,11365,5455,12565,5272,5247,12248,8484,66,8604,2264,5318,12634,3883,10197,5205,1821,10634,9683,11973,9457,5485,11272,8300,9374,1975,2451,10313,8943,9162,4293,10480,12605,214,6348,5223,6662,10024,36,594],"class_list":["post-26678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-africa","tag-african","tag-agriculture","tag-animal","tag-animals","tag-catalan","tag-city","tag-cold","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid","tag-disease","tag-dominican","tag-dominican-republic","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-factory","tag-family","tag-farmers","tag-fever","tag-football","tag-frozen","tag-georgia","tag-germany","tag-global-community","tag-government","tag-guinea","tag-health","tag-hong-kong","tag-investigation","tag-july","tag-kong","tag-lost","tag-millions","tag-one","tag-outbreak","tag-pandemic","tag-papua-new-guinea","tag-pigs","tag-population","tag-portugal","tag-pregnant","tag-professor","tag-scientist","tag-scientists","tag-spain","tag-spanish","tag-uk","tag-university","tag-us","tag-vaccination","tag-vaccine","tag-vietnam","tag-world","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}