José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaíno, professor of Animal Health at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of the VACDIVA project.
José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaíno is leading the European VACDIVA project, which this winter will test its vaccine on wild boars in Hungary, and which could be available at the end of 2024 or 2025.
The fate of millions of pigs in Europe could be decided this coming winter in a Hungarian forest. There, European Union researchers plan to test a vaccine against African swine fever (PPA) in wild boars.
ASF is a viral disease that threatens wild and domestic pigs throughout Europe. Without vaccines or treatment for ASF, outbreaks usually they kill infected pigs and often lead to culling to prevent the disease from spreading to other farms.
In Hungarian forests, researchers intend to place baits mixed with an experimental vaccine against ASF developed with EU funds. The goal is to immunize around 300 wild boars.
“The biggest problem in Europe at the moment is infected wild boar,” he says. José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaínoprofessor of Animal Health at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain in statements for the magazine of the European Union Research Funding Program Horizon. “If we reduce the disease in wild boars, we probably won’t need to vaccinate domestic pigs,” she says.
Sánchez-Vizcaíno leads a research project called VACDIVA, led by Sánchez-Vizcaíno, which has developed an experimental ASF vaccine with the help of more than €9 million in EU funding. That represents around 90% of the total cost of the project, which extends until July 2024.
Although ASF is harmless to people, puts the pork industry at risk billionaire in Europe. The EU has around 130 million pigs, its largest livestock category, with the largest populations in Spain, Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands.
ASF can be spread through wild boar, the actions of people, or even cured meats. This is because can survive on clothes, boots and wheelsas well as in pork products such as ham and sausages that are discarded by people and then eaten by wild boar.
The disease is spreading westwards in Europe, with the first cases in pig farms in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia discovered in June 2023. Affected countries also include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Poland and Romania.
In addition to being a deadly threat to pigs, ASF is an economic threat for EU pork producers. Animal deaths reduce business value and outbreaks mean costly restrictions, even on trade.
The EU is the world’s leading exporter of pork and the second largest producer, after China, of pork. China has had to cull more than 1 million pigs since August 2018 in an effort to stop the spread of ASF.
PROGRESS OF THE ASF VACCINE IN MADRID
The experimental vaccine from VACDIVA, an international collaboration in which laboratories from Europe, Africa and China participate, has emerged after being tested in a research center in Madrid.
The wild boars kept there were fed with the vaccine and they proved to be protected against ASF. The Hungarian trial of the VACDIVA project will allow wild boars to be tested in field conditions and identify how many consumed the vaccine bait. Without that information, researchers wouldn’t know how a vaccination campaign would progress.
The hope is that a vaccine will be widely available late 2024 or 2025. The path to this point was far from direct, as previous EU-funded research was part of the efforts to move forward.
Scientists have long known that only a live virus would work as a vaccine against ASF. But when a weakened virus was used to vaccinate pigs in Spain and Portugal in the 1960s, the animals sometimes became seriously ill.
This was because the virus changes shape as it replicates in animals, sometimes becoming weaker and sometimes stronger.
Part of the story is that ASF is caused by a very large DNA virus, with 180 genes, compared to, say, 10 in the Covid-19 virus. This allows ASF to take new forms in animals.
“For long periods of time we were not even looking for a vaccine because we knew the problems that a bad vaccine can cause in animals,” says Sánchez-Vizcaíno.
Then something happened. In the last decade, the advances in genetics have given scientists much greater insight into the virus and the means to modify its genome.
The researchers used new gene editing tools to reduce viral DNA. They created a virus that was a shell of the original, with a handful of genes immunologically chosen to push the pigs enough to give them immunity.
That is the vaccine that will appear in the planned trial in Hungary. The same vaccine at lower doses should work for farmed pigs if the need arises. “The wild boars are more resistant to African swine feverso we can use higher doses of vaccine for them,” explains Sánchez-Vizcaíno.
ENTRY PORTS
As it spread in Europe in 2023, ASF so far has remained outside countries such as France, Spain or Portugal. But it would only take one person disembarking from a ship in any of those nations to throw away a contaminated ham sandwich for a wild boar to eat it and become infected.
“There is no ‘fortress’ Europe when it comes to animal diseases,” he says. Ludek Broz, head of the department of ecological anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “And it’s difficult to understand the spread of this disease without taking humans into account.”
Broz studies ASF and its intersection with hunters and veterinarians as part of another EU-funded project. Called BOAR, the research initiative runs for five years until June 2025.
The most recent arrival of ASF in Europe occurred in 2007 not Georgia when food waste from a ship was delivered to backyard pigs in the port of Poti. The virus then spread to Russia and towards the west, reaching the EU in 2014 on the Lithuanian border with Belarus.
The disease itself has existed for millennia in Africa, among wild boars, generally without causing symptoms. He was first identified in Kenya in the 1920s when he sickened farm pigs that European settlers brought with them.
Among other things, it is focusing on attitudes towards the disease, mainly among hunters and veterinary authorities. When Broz traveled to Ukraine in early 2023, he noticed that in the border with Slovakia most of the checks were for illegal foods. Hunters have also been recruited by veterinary authorities to help stop the disease.
Hunters are often tasked with collect boar carcasses because they can be the source of the virus for live wild boar. This was a question that researchers disagreed on until recently.
“If you leave a carcass of a pig and a deer in the forest, the wild boar will eat only the deer,” Broz points out. “But after about two months, in a certain state of decomposition, the wild boar will start to eat the boar carcass”, he points out.
This is a big challenge because the ASF virus can survive in dead bodies for many months at least. Broz is also interested in Public attitudes towards an ASF vaccineespecially in light of claims from some segments of Western society during the Covid-19 pandemic that question the effectiveness and safety of such a health measure for people.
He hopes BOAR can add information about people’s attitudes and help stop the African swine fever virus sweeping Europe.
2023-09-11 07:27:00
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