Farmscape for June 26, 2023

A new lung plague vaccine will help protect the livelihoods of farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially those with small herds.
The Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, the Kenya Agricultural Livestock Research Organization and the International Livestock Research Institute have developed a new vaccine to protect cattle from Contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, or lung plague, a disease typically found in Sub-Saharan Africa.
VIDO Director and CEO Dr. Volker Gerdts says this subunit vaccine was developed at VIDO using reverse vaccinology.

Quote-Dr. Volker Gerdts-Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization:
We had 66 prototype vaccines that initially were developed which where then screened in a number of trails and tested for their effectiveness to derive this combination where we have now four proteins in this vaccine.
We just ran a large field trial in Africa and in this trial we compared our candidate vaccine to an existing commercial vaccine.
It was shown that our vaccine was as good as the already existing commercial vaccine, even better.
But more importantly our vaccine offers a number of advantages over the existing vaccine.
It's a fairly stable vaccine so it doesn't require a cold chain which is highly problematic in Africa.
It can be used in animals that at the same time are being treated with antibiotics.
The commercial vaccine is a live attenuated vaccine and so you can't treat animals with antibiotics at the same where as in our case you could.
It is very costs effective and then, very important, the current vaccine has some severe side effects in some animals so our vaccine is much safer to use.
It is also called DIVA (Differentiating Infected from Vaccinated Animals) vaccine so it has the potential recognise infected from vaccinated animals.
So, there is a number of advantages that will make this vaccine a very effective vaccine for use in these animals.

Dr. Gerdts says these advantages make the management of these animals easier and provide bigger economic gains for those producers.
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Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers