Candidate Vaccine Protects Pigs against African Swine Fever Strains

Oct 29, 2021

By Greg Cima

A U.S. Department of Agriculture–developed vaccine protected pigs against African swine fever in a second study.

Results published Sept. 28 indicate pigs administered the candidate vaccine not only survived but often remained free of clinical signs of illness when experimentally inoculated with an ASF virus strain that has been circulating in Vietnam. The work follows previous results, published in April 2020 in the Journal of Virology, that indicated the candidate vaccine was effective against a strain first identified in 2007 in the country of Georgia.

The new results, published in September in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, resulted from a collaboration of scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, which developed the vaccine, and National Veterinary Joint Stock Co., which conducted the studies at its facility in Vietnam. The study results are available online ahead of print.

Dr. Douglas Gladue, who is a research microbiologist for the ARS and one of the developers of the ASF candidate vaccine, said NAVETCO was able to show the vaccine protected European and Asian breeds of pigs against a virus strain recently isolated in Vietnam. His co-developer and fellow ARS research biologist Manuel Borca, PhD, said the vaccine was based on a 2007 isolate from the country of Georgia, and the report showed the vaccine could protect against a strain of ASF that had evolved in the years since.

Dr. Gladue said the company plans to conduct field trials in Vietnam, but those studies had not begun at press time.

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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.