24 June 2008
Windhoek — SCIENTISTS at the Australian branch of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) have developed a new test for foot-and-mouth disease that involves no infectious viral material and can differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals.
This "DIVA" test of that country's CSIRO Animal Health Laboratory could transform how foot-and-mouth disease is controlled in future because it's relatively inexpensive and does not require infectious viruses to produce the reagents, it said last week.
The British government decided against using vaccines to control a major outbreak in 2001 because the tests available to them could not distinguish between infected and vaccinated animals.
The outbreak was finally contained only after the slaughter of more than 6 000 000 animals. Most were not infected.
"Our test is the first in the world to be built entirely from non-living materials produced in the laboratory," says Janine Muller, who developed the test with CSIRO colleagues while completing her PhD.
"We have been able to build and manufacture the critical components of our test from the ground up. We unravelled the structure of an antibody to an important protein the virus injects into cells.
They then generated its genetic template and used it to engineer the antibodies at the heart of the test," Muller told reporters.
Foot-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious viral infection, is considered the most economically devastating disease affecting farm animals worldwide, especially in Africa.
Botswana is presently killing livestock in western Botswana after a recent outbreak of the disease.
The test itself is a faster and more sensitive way of detecting the disease in livestock.
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