Adenoviruses Offer Safe Approach to ASF Vaccine Development

Sep 07, 2020

The Director and CEO of VIDO-InterVac says the use of an adenovirus as a vector to deliver the proteins needed to stimulate an immune response to African Swine Fever is among the safest approaches to providing protection from the disease. Researchers around the world are using a variety of techniques to develop vaccines to protect pigs from African Swine Fever. The approach being used by VIDO-InterVac involves inserting specific proteins from African Swine Fever into another harmless virus for delivery as a vaccine.

VIDO-InterVac Director and CEO Dr. Volker Gerdts says using an adenovirus as a vector allows you to stimulate an immune response but you don't have to actually expose the herd to African Swine Fever.

Clip-Dr. Volker Gerdts-VIDO-InterVac:

I think there is good indication from other labs that adenoviral vectors are potent and may work for African Swine Fever so I think there is great promise in that these adenoviruses will work as a vaccine for African Swine Fever.

The other nice thing about them, and this is really important in the context of biosecurity. Using an adenovirus as a vector offers the advantage that you don't have to actually use the virus, the African Swine Fever virus.

Everything we do is working the adenoviral vector and so we're not really including, at any step, the African Swine Fever virus in this process. That is very important from a biosecurity point of view to ensure that our Canadian swine herd is safe and that we're not by accident introducing the virus into the herd.

Source : Farmscape

Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

I am going to show you how we save our farm money by making our own pig feed. It's the same process as making our cattle feed just with a slight adjustment to our grinder/ mixer that makes all the difference. We buy all the feed stuff required to make the total mix feed. Run each through the mixer and at the end of the process we have a product that can be consumed by our pigs.

I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.