Farmscape for May 19, 2026

The creation of new diagnostics for the identification of Japanese encephalitis virus is helping ensure the U.S. is prepared in the event the infection makes its way to North America.
Japanese encephalitis virus is a mosquito born infection that affects multiple species, including pigs and people, found in Asia and the western Pacific but is not present in North America.
With funding provided through the Swine Health Information Center and Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research JEV Research Program, Integrated Research Associates is developing new diagnostics for JEV.
SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says researchers have created two prototype diagnostic tests that use nonhazardous recombinant JEV virus-like particles as viral antigens.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
The value of this project is to develop and expand the available tools that we can use to detect the virus.
It also helps globally because it's not just detecting one particular genotype in one area but utilizes multiple genes in one test to be able to identify what genotype is present and help understand where or how it came into the U.S.
In addition, it can also be utilized to differentiate potentially vaccine should it ever be used versus a wild type infection.
This work was relatively complex to develop what genes need to be incorporated into the test to be able to maximise and optimise identification but then also utilizing what's called virus like particles which can replace inactivated virus in the test and allow for multiple antigens or multiple genes to be represented per diagnostic test.
They also worked on the format of this test to be able to have increased scalability, or the increased ease of ramping up production should it ever be necessary.

Dr. Becton says it's important to build our tool kit to provide rapid identification of this virus and not just one genotype but multiple genotypes, because that's what's circulating globally.
Full details on this work can be found at swinehealth.org.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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