Long feared, it’s now finally happened. African swine fever (ASF), an infectious and highly lethal viral disease of pigs, has for the first time reared its head in China. Just two weeks ago, African swine fever was confirmed as the cause of death of pigs on a small farm in Shenyang City, in Liaoning Province, located in the northeast, bordering North Korea and the Yellow Sea.
Vish Nene, one of the scientific organizers of the conference and a co-leader of the Animal and Human Health program at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, gave a particularly lucid talk at the pre-meeting workshop on Novel tools and genomics approaches supporting vaccine development. The following is a transcript of Nene’s talk, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
ILRI was honoured by a visit this week to ILRI by Julie Borlaug (left) and Jeannie Borlaug Laube, granddaugher and daughter of Norman Borlaug, respectively.
Tremendous research progress has been made over the last ten years to better control the deadly African disease of cattle known as East Coast fever. This disease is caused by a single-celled organism, Theileria parva, which is carried by some tick species. Cattle become infected when a tick carrying the parasite takes a blood-meal from the animal over several days.
Brian Perry (left) interviews Mario Herrero in a ‘hard talk’ series at ILRI’s annual program meeting in 2006 in Nairobi (photo credit: ILRI). Several years ago, staff of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) innovated ways to enliven their annual program meetings (aka, death by research powerpoint). One of the ways ILRI shook things up …
Researchers have received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop anew-generation vaccine for East Coast fever. which could inform malaria and cancer research.